Expressive Painting & Colour Mixing

By Paula Briggs

This post shares how we can enable an exploration of primary and secondary colours, colour mixing and expressive mark making with paint, with primary-aged children.

Most often when schools introduce children to primary and secondary colours it is through the creation of a colour wheel, often with the expectation that the execution will be “neat”, turning the process into a technical skill.

In this session, pupils learn about primary and secondary colours through hands on experience of paint mixing and importantly paint application. They use a variety of made and sourced “tools” to help them apply the paint, layering primary and then secondary colours, and exploring expressive mark making. They start to think about how to use colour and mark making in response to what is already there – a key skill in painting.

Children work on sheets of paper (approx A4) and then consolidate the learning by choosing sections of their painted sheets to develop as sketchbook work, helping develop reflection and articulation skills, ready for the next stage of learning.

primary colours sketchbook page

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Talking Points: Paul Klee

A collection of imagery and sources designed to encourage children to explore the work of Paul Klee.

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Watercolour Paintings by Paul Klee

Take a close look at these paintings. Use the questions to talk about them as a class.

Klee was born in 1879 in Switzerland. When he was 35 he visited Tunisia in Africa, where his experience of the light and colours of the landscapes and architecture helped awaken his interest in colour.

He became less interested in painting exactly what he saw and in fact from 1915 onwards he never again worked from a model. Instead, he became interested in painting the colours around him, letting them detach themselves from the objects the colours were on. In this way his worked moved towards Abstraction.

He became interested in creating fantastical worlds, full of symbols, shapes, colour and line.

He took his inspiration from the world around him, and his imaginative response to the world, and also from poetry, music and literature.

Sometimes his work was serious and meditative, other times it was full of humour. He also loved the sounds of words and phrases and the titles of works were often very important to Klee.

Battle scene from the funny and fantastic opera "The Seafarers" (1923) painting in high resolution by Paul Klee. Original from the Kunstmuseum Basel Museum