Revisiting the Color Wheel

A while back, I posted a printable about the color wheel, and we had used it a time or two using colored water and eye droppers, but it really didn’t get the use that I had intended.  Well, little did I know that all it took was a different medium, and voila! exploring ensued!

Here’s a link to that original post.

A friend of mine had downloaded these files a while back.  She recently asked us over for a playdate… and also to do a little art lesson with the kiddos, demonstrating to her how to use these materials.

 

We started by building our own color wheel out of paints.  We did not use the above template, but rather we mixed the primary colors to make the secondary colors… and then carefully mixing the others to make the tertiaries.  (In reflection, I probably should have used the template instead, as the little ones had a hard time of mixing the paints before they dried.)

We also talked about the tertiary names of each color as we created them.  The original file has a matching activity for the names on the color wheel, to reinforce this color names. 

By this point, our little 5-year-old boys were DONE with painting, but her older daughter was still interested.

I pull out of the the shades of purple template.  Since I wasn’t sure how well my friend trusted her daughter to place dots of acrylic paint on a piece of paper… on her dining room table… without any drop cloths…. I figured I’d go ahead and place the paint on the dots for her.  Together, she and I carefully swirled the colors in each circle, until the colors had blended.  We had a blast painting these, and thoroughly enjoyed mixing the colors to see exactly what shade of purple would be created.

I don’t know if you can see this from the photo below, but the “shades of purple” color mixing chart easily shows the child the variations of color between red and blue – all depending upon how much blue and red is used!  (It was MUCH more obvious than this photo shows.)

NOTE:  If you do this activity at home, make sure that you use a different paintbrush for EACH circle; otherwise, even after rinsing the brush in paint, you may get some residual paint that could taint your results.

Once again, check out the original post, which has the printable for these “shades of…” color wheels, as well as the matching activities for the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors on the color wheel.