In no particular order, I thought I would share some of my favorite books about color! There are many, many other books out there about color and so many more on my wish list. But these are books that I actually have in my art classroom and have used! Whether it’s to introduce a concept, base a project off of, or just a nice book to fill the time in the art room, these are my tried and true favorite books about color.
Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh
This is a classic for any art teacher! Or any teacher of young children for that matter. Three white mice are hiding from a cat but get into some paint. Red, yellow, and blue to be exact. They end up playing in the colors and creating new colors! This is a perfect book to introduce the primary and secondary colors to little students. I use it with Kindergarten and they create their own secondary colors by mixing the primary ones. It’s like magic!
Mixed: A Colorful Story by Arree Chung
Another great book about mixing colors. I’ve used it with my young kindergarteners but older students would appreciate it as well. It’s also a great story about understanding each other’s differences and getting along. In the story, red, yellow, and blue dots live in a town where they are all separated and don’t get along. Until one day, two of them (from different sides of town!) fall in love and mix! Colors all over start mixing and creating new colors. Once again, a great way to introduce how to mix colors to make new ones and students can experiment and have fun creating all new colors by starting out with the primary colors. It’s also fun to add faces, arms, and legs to the dots of colors and create very animated characters like in the book!
Painting the Town by Denise Minnerly
I have used this book over and over again with my kindergarten classes. Unfortunately, it is out of print now, but if you can get a hold of a copy, grab it! Two children come across a town that is all white. There is a tree with apples that are primary colors. By throwing certain colors into the town, the buildings begin to change colors! Again, a great book for teaching color mixing. I have students draw 3 buildings in permanent marker on white paper. Then, we use water colors to mix the primary colors to paint each building a secondary color. We put a dot of each primary color under the building that it helped create, this looks like the apples in the book.
Color Blocked – Ashley Sorenson
I love watching this book through Vooks online! It is so animated and fun. All ages will appreciate the story but I have done this with 2nd graders, specifically. In the story, a factory that makes colors gets all blocked up and the colors start going all over the place! It has you move the book in different directions and you see the plain spilling everywhere. The primaries mix to make the secondaries. But one of my favorite things about this book are the illustrations. THe black and white pipes, gears, knows, buttons, and pretty much all things mechanical are so fun to recreate on your own. And then the colors are paint spills and splatters! Kids have so much fun creating their own factories with pipes going all over and then splattering watercolor paint around. I have them use a straw to blow liquid watercolors across the paper.
Sky Color by Peter H. Reynolds
This book just makes me feel so at peace. When students are working on creating a mural, Marisol can’t find the color blue for the sky. But then she notices the sky changing colors when it sets, at night time, in the rain, it’s not always blue! She dreams of a coloring, swirling sky and the next day mixes many colors together to paint the sky of the mural a new color. She calls it ‘sky color.’ I love the image at the end of the book where you see the whole mural and the sky she created with swirling, beautiful colors. A good reminder to stay creative and nothing has to be one certain way. Nothing is perfect.
Swatch:The Girl Who Loved Color by Julia Denos
This book has beautiful descriptive words about colors that exude feelings. THe illustrations are vibrant and gestural. Definitely a book that will catch any student’s attention. The story is about a girl who collects colors. She hunts down the wild colors and tames them by putting them in jars. Until one day, she is surprised to find a color that doesn’t want to be tamed and she ends up learning from the color. Together they make a masterpiece with all her colors. This is a book you will definitely want to have in your art room library collection! Any age will love the wildness and vibrant color.
Mix It Up by Herve Tullett
So fun for the little students in your life, this book is so interactive! Making you rub your fingers in the images to mix paint, smashing pages, shaking the book. It is all about following the directions of the book to see what happens to the colors next. A great book for young students like kindergarten and preschool and perfect for small group settings where you could let them take turns doing the actions themselves. It’s a good introductory book into experimenting with paint and art to see what happens.
A Pocket Full of Colors by Amy Guglielmo and Jacqueline Tourville
This book is about real life artist, Mary Blair, who worked for Disney and is known for the iconic imagery of the ride It’s a Small World. Fun geometric shapes and bright colors. We learn the story of Mary starting when she was a little girl who loved color.The descriptions of colors are beautiful, never calling a color by their ordinary name. When Mary grows up, she finds that society doesn’t want women in illustrator roles and has to fight her way through to work with the men. She creates beautiful and colorful images for stories but they are unusual and people don’t like them at first. This is an inspiring story about a person who beat the odds and didn’t give up. What a wonderful lesson to teach your students!
I hope you find this helpful if you are searching for new books to add to your class library or you are trying to find new ideas and ways to introduce colors to your students! I have all of these in my actual art classroom and use them with my students. My students love them and some of them I think I I’ve even more than them!
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Keep blending,
Laura