No-Mess Paint Experiments

Primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. Secondary colors are orange, green, and purple. Your child can discover how primary colors mix together to create secondary colors! Work on color recognition and color science!

What You Need for this Craft:

plastic bags
red, yellow, blue, and white paint
tape
black permanent marker

Directions:

1. Draw pictures on the plastic bags using a permanent marker. Below are ideas of what you could draw. Be creative! You don't have to use my ideas. You could draw pictures better interest your own unique child.

Teaching Tip: If your child is old enough to use a permanent marker, he or she could draw the pictures.

2. Add the 2 primary colors that will create the secondary color you intend to create. If your child is working on color recognition, have him or her name the primary colors.

3. Seal the bag. Then tape the bag for a second seal.

4. Have your child mix the paint together with his or her fingers to create the secondary color.

Red and blue paint in a bag

Purple paint in a bag

Yellow and red paint in a bag

Yellow and blue paint in a bag

Green paint in a bag

Red and white paint in a bag

Pink paint in a bag

White is not actually a primary color. Technically, white is the absence of color, so it is not considered a primary color.

Teaching Tip: If you have a child just learning colors, make color learning into a game. You find something blue. Then ask your child to find something else blue. It often helps if the object that you find is small enough that the child can carry it around to compare to other objects.

Teaching Tip: You could create a color wheel for a messy way to review primary and secondary colors. A color wheel is a circle with different colored sectors used to show the relationship between colors. So each secondary color will be between the two primary colors that create it.

Complementary Colors

If your child has created a color wheel or you show your child a color wheel, you can teach your child that colors opposite to each other on the wheel are called Complementary Colors. Red and green are complementary colors. So are yellow and purple. Blue and orange are as well. When two colors opposite of each other are mixed together, it creates the color brown.

Yellow and purple paint in a bag

Red and green paint in a bag

Mixed brown paint in a bag