“The Soul Becomes Dyed with the Color of its Thoughts.”
-Marcus Aurelius
Need an art project to spend an hour or so in the afternoon? Enjoy this short activity on the color wheel by baking cookies and combining colors to make frosting!! Plus- you can eat your project afterwards!
Supplies
To do this activity, you’ll need:
- sugar cookies, or buy some plain vanilla round wafer cookies
- plain white frosting – 2
- Food coloring – red, blue, and yellow
- paper plate
- ramekins, or bowls to mix the frosting colors
- knife for spreading frosting
- spoon for mixing frosting
You can either make cookies, or buy some plain vanilla wafers or other type of round cookie. You will also need to buy plain white frosting, or make your own. I would suggest buying 2 full containers of frosting, so you have plenty if the color doesn’t come out the way you want it the first time. As for food coloring, you will only need the 3 primary colors (red, blue, yellow) because your child will be creating all of the other colors for the color wheel!
Cookies
First of all, the cookies. This is the basic sugar cookie recipe that we followed. You can click the link to find the full recipe, but off-hand you will need 1 egg, 2.5 cups of flour, 1 stick of butter, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and vanilla extract. We didn’t have any frosting on hand, so we also made our own buttercream frosting! While the cookies are baking, you can start making the frosting colors.
To do this, I found a template for a color wheel on another blog, The Handmade Home. You can download the freebie template here (just scroll down to “color wheel”). I printed this out to help teach about the colors as we went along with the projects. **Note: her template is actually for play-doh, which you could totally also do!!
We used ramekins to mix the different frosting colors because they are small and easy for the kids to work with. You could easily use paper plates or small bowls.
Color Wheel
First, we made the primary colors for the color wheel. I started by asking my girls “which colors were the primary colors?” They knew! So while our cookies were baking, we mixed one bowl or red, one of blue, and one of yellow. Next, we mixed up the secondary colors: orange, violet, and green. Again, I asked my children if they knew the secondary colors, and it took a few minutes but they figured it out. So we mixed one bowl of orange (red+yellow), one bowl of green (yellow+blue), and one bowl of violet (blue+red). Our violet came out a little dark because somebody went overboard with the blue!
Next, we mixed the Intermediate Colors. These were a little harder for the girls to figure out on their own, but I kept asking them as we went along anyway. We made Yellow-Green (which ended up looking more like the color of snot!), blue-green, blue-violet, red-violet, orange-red (which came out a lot like red!), and orange-yellow. To make these, we used one drop extra of each of the shades we were trying to make (for example- yellow-green was one drop blue and two drops yellow). Our colors were not perfect, so feel free to experiment with your own combinations!
When the cookies cooled, we frosted them and we arranged them on the sheet! (see above) If your cookies are a little bigger, you could widen out the circle to make them all fit!
That wraps up our color wheel activity! Enjoy!
If you’d like to see more, visit our unit on the water cycle from last week!