Coloured Emotions
The Set Up
Begin with a chat about feelings and colour. Does red always mean anger to you? Or can it feel warm and protective? What does blue make you feel? Everyone sees colours differently, and that is what makes this so fascinating!
Set out watercolours, paint sticks, or markers with palettes for mixing. Encourage artists to spend time creating colours they are drawn to before they even think about painting. Often it is in the mixing that the best surprises come; two shades swirl together and suddenly you have a colour that feels exactly like nervous excitement or quiet pride.
The Making
Add the colours to your page as circles, splashes, or blotches etc. Let each one hold a feeling, a memory, or even just a mood (even if you can't name it).
This is something artists have explored for centuries. Kandinsky believed colours carried sound and emotion, painting yellow as playful like trumpets and blue as deep like a cello. Mark Rothko layered colours to create moods so powerful that people sometimes cried standing in front of his work. Even Munch’s The Scream shows how colour itself can carry intensity before you even notice the figure.
Psychologists study this too. Red can make your heart beat faster. Yellow often feels joyful like sunshine. Blue might calm one person but make another feel melancholy. In some cultures white means peace, in others mourning. It shows us that colour is never fixed, it is personal, cultural, and emotional all at once.
Can you tell how much I love thinking about colours!
Variations
Trade colours with someone else and see how it feels to use their version of “joy” or “anger.”
Create a collaborative grid where everyone adds their own emotion colour, forming a patchwork of the group’s feelings.
Draw expressions to match whatever that colour means to you.
Materials
Watercolours, paint sticks, or markers
Mixing palettes, brushes, water jars
Heavy paper or card
Oil pastels or pens for layering words or textures