Exploring Art: Playing With Color
Exploring Art: Playing With Color
Love Jen and her ideas! We are excited to have her during our “Exploring Art” week and loving how she is sharing Exploring Art: Playing With Color! Let those kids experiment and play with colors!
Hi! I’m Jen Goode and I absolutely love art! I’m a professional illustrator and blogger living in Colorado. I’ve wanted to “be an artist” since I was really young and it all started with coloring! I’m excited to be here on Crafting Chicks today sharing a fun little art activity.If you’re looking for a fun and easy way to start exploring art with your kids, color is a great place to begin! There’s so much to learn and do when playing with color. So today I’m going to show you an idea that will get the kids coloring, thinking about color and learning how colors blend. This is a great activity to do with kids of all ages. Toddlers can explore basic understanding of color while older kids can try new ideas and experiment with mixing the colors.
Playing with Color
It’s likely your kids already color sometimes, right? This activity encourages exploring what happens when colors mix and the basics of color theory (Which I didn’t learn until college!). You can talk about the color wheel (here’s a free printable) and which colors blend best together. Or you can just jump right in and see what happens with any 2 to 3 colors.
Materials you need:
- Water based/ washable markers (I love Crayola)
- White paper or cardstock
- White Coffee filters
- Small container of water
- Paintbrush
Instructions
- Cover the work space, even markers can leave a mess when kids start having fun with art!
- Place a white sheet of paper under a coffee filter.
- Using the markers, color the coffee filter. Watch what happens when you overlap the coloring. For my example, I used red, yellow and blue – the “primary colors” on the color wheel.
- Next, grab the paintbrush and water and paint the coffee filter. Watch the colors blend even more!
- Once you’re finished painting. Lift the coffee filter from the paper and look at the bonus art you just made. The colors will have blended and look almost like a water color painting!
How fun is that? Sometimes it’s the most simple activities that inspire more questions and ideas. I still love to watch the colors blend and see what happens when I mix different colors. Especially with all the different marker sets you can find these days!
For extra fun, grab a kids coloring page then color and paint a coffee filter on top of the color page… as if you were tracing the picture. It’s fun to see what the painting looks like when you’re finished.
There are all kinds of fun things you can make with these colored coffee filters once they are dry. So, make sure to save them for your next project! I have a tutorial on my site showing how to make pretty tissue flowers with coffee filters like these. For more playing with color experimenting… try using watercolor paints instead of markers. Test out the difference in color intensity between the paints and the markers. Blend the two together or just have fun adding colors to the coffee filters and seeing what art appears on the paper underneath!I can’t wait to hear about the fun things you’ve discovered while playing with color with your kids! You can find more fun art and craft ideas as well, as printables for your projects, on my blog, 100 Directions.
Want more? Check out all of our Exploring Art posts here!
Still want more, you won’t want to miss our past Summer Survival Series.
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