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5 Fun Color Mixing Activities for Kids

by Melissa Garrett
March 1, 2025
color mixing

Fun color mixing activities for kids, including how to mix paint, color science experiments, and fun kids’ pictures books.

Updated April 2025

You can never really do too many color mixing activities with kids—there’s always a new shade to discover or a creative twist to try. 

Watching two colors blend into a brand new one feels like magic, and it’s a powerful, hands-on way for kids to explore primary and secondary colors. 

Color mixing also taps into kids’ natural curiosity and offers a rich sensory experience. These playful experiments build both creativity and foundational knowledge.

Here are some fantastic color mixing ideas from The Artful Parent and beyond, including paint recipes, baking soda and vinegar surprises, liquid watercolor play, and lovely children’s books that introduce color mixing concepts. Get ready for some colorful, creative fun!

5 Color Mixing Activities for Kids

baking soda coloring mixing
Photo by Rachel Withers

1. Baking Soda and Vinegar Color Mixing

This color mixing activity is a fun combination of science, art, and problem solving. By adding colored vinegar to jars of baking soda, kids create marvelously colored explosions!

primary colors paint
Photo by Jean Van’t Hul

2. How to Mix Paint With Kids by Meri Cherry

A great primer from Meri Cherry about the basics of letting kids make a wide, expansive rainbow of amazing colors starting only with the three primary colors and white.

watercolor mixing
Photo by Anna Harpe

3. Liquid Watercolor Mixing on Wet Paper

Using masking tape to divide a wet piece of watercolor paper or canvas board into sections, each section becomes a mini-painting to fill with two primary colors. On wet media, the colors mix so that you can still see the primary colors as well as the new secondary color.

shaving cream paint
Photo by Jean Van’t Hul

4. Colored Shaving Cream Paint Mixing from Meri Cherry

This activity from Meri Cherry uses shaving cream and food coloring to let kids mix two primary colors together and introduces the book Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni. It would also work just as beautifully with other primary colors!

finger painting
Photo by Jean Van’t Hul

5. Color Theory for Little Ones

This simple but powerful activity lets kids mix primary colors with fingerpaints (you could also use tempera or acrylic paints) on butcher paper with their hands.

If you’re introducing your kids to color theory and paint mixing, you might like to read a fun picture book first before doing one of the color mixing activities above. Here are a few that we love.

More Painting Activities for Kids

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5 Fun Color Mixing Activities for Kids

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