Teaching a child to mix colors is easy. Use vegetable colors or pre-made watercolors.Watercolors are permanent pigments, vegetable colors turn brown quickly and are called fugitive.
Steps
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Fill three glasses of water and color them cyan, magenta and yellow, all transparent primary colors. You can use food coloring from Easter if they include the primary colors.
- Mix all three of them together in a separate cup to make a dark black color.
- Mix and make the secondary colors: red, blue and green.
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By mixing the primary color with the opposite secondary color, you can make a darker shade of either color. That's the way nature does it in shadows.
Tips
- This is what glasses of colored water looked like after teaching a 3rd grade class using water colors.
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- The water color pigments are called: Indian Yellow Transparent Tartrazine PY100, Transparent Magenta PR122 and Transparent Cyan PB15. The letters and numbers are part of the world wide official ASTM Name and Color Number list.
- Mixing these three colors together in different combinations will make any color.
- These colors are the same as used in professional printer/plotters to print giclees.
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- Vegetable transparent magenta = beet juice
- Herb transparent yellow = turmeric. In its mass tone it is yellow ocher in color, and as a tint it is bright yellow. The same gradation is in the Real Color Wheel and yellow crystals, and in bananas as they get older.
- Transparent cyan does not exist in the plant world. Cyan is the color of the sky. Iron or copper will make cyan. The pigment is called pathalocyanne, PB15.
