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!
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
Foam painting is fun and irresistibly fluffy! Try these easy ideas for fun sensory play…
Melissa Garrett
Melissa Garrett is a parent, teacher, social worker, mess maker and lover of art supplies. She has a host of experience teaching and working with lots of different age groups, especially preschoolers. She also has a background in music and loves to integrate sound and art into the classroom and everyday life as much as possible.
Melissa loves open-ended art exploration, sewing with unexpected materials, finding interesting sounds in surprising places, going on forest adventures, and letting kids explore the world at their own pace. She has an 8-year-old daughter who really enjoys being covered with paint from head to toe, a 5-year-old son who is possibly the loudest person alive, and a very patient spouse who balances her chaos.
