Young at Art: Mixing Colors

Do you remember the old ziplock commercials?  Yellow and blue makes green!  The two sides of the zipper were yellow and blue mixing to make green - an excellent marketing use of color mixing magic.  

In the studio, we return to color mixing time and again and find that the magic is there for kids of all ages.

Color is fascinating and mixing colors in paint is a great way to combine science and art along with a little magic.  

Choose your favorite paints: tempera, watercolor, poster paints, even finger paints will work.  

Begin by offering kids red, yellow and white in a muffin tray, ice cube tray or just on a paper plate.  Allow them to experiment with mixing.

Toddlers and young children will be ready to dive right in with the brush in the paint, while older children may enjoy some time to just mix colors on the tray, trying different color combinations to make new colors.  

You need red, yellow, blue and some white. We can mix a full spectrum of colors from just this simple beginning with the primary colors.  

Introduce some color vocabulary along the way; we begin with red and yellow - because they are the WARM colors, the ones that remind us of fire.  Also talk about strong and weak colors.

The red is much stronger than the yellow and the white (the weakest color) so it will take less red than yellow to make orange.  Encourage children to put the stronger (darker) color into the weaker color so they can see changes in smaller increments.

A good challenge is to see how many different oranges can you make.  Or how many shades of pink.  Having an ice cube tray or other divided surface will allow younger children to mix more colors as they can keep separate containers of color.

Once you have mixed a group of colors, switch to painting and see what you can create with this warm color palette, such as a fire, a sunset, an abstract image of shapes and lines.

At another sitting move on to yellow and blue and white.  Now you have a warm color (yellow) and a cool color (blue).  What happens when they mix?  Blue is much stronger than yellow and you will notice this in your mixing.   Again, use the white to add tints and greater variety to the colors in your palette.

Having mixed your greens, you can paint a dedicated green-blue-yellow painting and see what associations you find for these colors.

Finally, move on to red and blue, again you have a warm color and a cool color but now they are more similar in strength - both are strong dark colors.  Try to mix a warm purple and a cool violet.  What happens when you add white to the mix?

Again see how many different shades and tints you can mix and try a painting with your red-blue-violet palette.