Discoveries: Color

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Color

Please Touch Museum

Philadelphia, PA

Explore more at

http://www.pleasetouchmuseum.org/

 
Materials


 Very large piece of white paper
 Paints – red, yellow, blue, and white
 Paint brush
 Water

Instructions

  1. Paint red on the paper.
  2. Mix yellow into the red on the paper -- what happens? What color did you make?
  3. Paint red on another part of the paper.
  4. Mix blue into the red – what happens? What color did you make?
  5. Paint red on another part of the paper.
  6. Mix white into the red – do you think it will be lighter or darker? What happens?
  7. Can you make any other colors with red?

Why It’s So

One way to experiment with colors is by mixing paints. For artists, yellow, blue and red are the primary colors. All other paint colors can be made from these three primary colors. When you mix two primary colors together, you can create a new color, which are called secondary colors. Orange, purple and green are secondary colors. The primary and secondary colors together represent the colors of the rainbow!
 
A different type of color mixing occurs when you add white paint to a primary color. The amount of white in a color changes a color’s value. A color with more white in it than another has a lighter value than the original color. Now imagine what a lighter shade of red looks like. Can you think of a name for that color? Try mixing it! The color is pink!

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