Whether it’s with fingers or a brush, painting is fabulous, and creating with colour is a joy. Kids love it… but sometimes parents are surprised when the rainbow palette they offer to children creates artwork that looks more ‘mud’ than ‘masterpiece’.

There’s an easy way to introduce colour mixing to kids in a way that keeps their paintings bright…. and it relies on you having a basic understanding of the colour wheel.

The Colour Wheel is the cornerstone of colour science, which can be very complex once it meanders into the land of complementary, analogous and triadic colours. It’s a really fascinating science, but for the purposes of pre-school painting you don’t need to go there.

All you need to know at this stage is that the colour wheel begins with…

3 primary colours:

• red

• yellow

• blue

These primary colours are special because they cannot be created from other colors. In fact they’re the source of all other colors, in that other colours are made by combining them in various ways. However, when you mix all 3 of the primary colours together, the results can become, well…. pretty murky! See my sample below…

When you set up paints for kids it can be helpful to keep this in mind. If, however, you set out just 2 primary colours plus white, their artworks will stay colourful and bright.

You should also know the following combos…

• Red + yellow = orange

• Blue + yellow = green

• Blue + red = purple

For a child, learning to mix these new colours from primary colours is like magic.

A clever way to ensure that kids’ paintings stay colourful is to offer them only any 2 primary colours plus white paint. From just these 3 elements they’ll be able to create bright colours like the following…

So, to put it simply… by controlling the colour palette you are actually not only offering your child some valuable learning in colour science, you’re also enabling them to make light, bright paintings. It’s worth a try... have fun x