Experimenting with Colour Mixing

Continuing on with our colour inquiry, we were introduced to the paintings of Piet Mondrian.  We noticed that the squares and rectangles he painted were red, yellow and blue which are the three primary colours. To help us remember these colours, we created our own primary colour art inspired by Mondrian's abstract style.

First, we cut out squares and rectangles in the primary colours and glued them to a white paper making sure to leave lots of room between the shapes.  Then we added a continuous line of black paint (we called it a road) around all the squares.

Another artist we looked at was Wassily Kandinsky.  We studied his painting "Colour Study. Squares with Concentric Circles." 

Our job was to paint our own version of this painting. The only problem was that we only had the three primary colours to work with. We set to work and discovered that when we mixed the colours together we made new colours.

**Make sure to look at our bulletin boards outside the kindergarten room to see the finished pieces.**

After we discovered that we could make new colours by mixing the primary colours together, we began to explore in a variety of ways.

First, we used q-tips to mix two primary colours together.  Our mixing produced green, purple and orange which we know are the secondary colours.

Then we used spray bottles filled with the primary colours and sprayed the water into buckets.  We were so excited every time we made a secondary colour.  

Miss B. showed us the magic milk experiment. She poured some milk into a shallow dish and added some red, blue and yellow food colouring.  Then she added a drop of dish soap.  As soon as the dish soap hit the milk, the food colouring began to swirl and mix together which created the secondary colours. 

Another way we made the secondary colours was by mixing up two pieces of play dough. After a lot of squishing we were so excited to see a secondary colour begin to form. We loved how bright the colours turned out.

We also tried mixing colours with shaving cream.  We squirted a dollop of shaving cream and a few drops of food colouring into a ziploc bag. Then we squished the baggies in our hands to mix it up.  What we found when we opened up the baggies was that the colours were very light.  We learned that white make colours lighter.