Primary Color Wheel and Color Wheel Coloring Page

A primary color wheel that easily displays primary, secondary, warm and cool colors will help students learn the basics of color theory.

It’s never too early to start adding some very basic color theory to art lessons for elementary students. Even kindergarteners can absorb the idea that blue, like the ocean, is a cool color and red, like fire, is a warm color. Learning how to group colors together and think about the qualities that each has is part of the artistic growth process.

Searching for visual aids to explain these ideas to children can lead to lot of complex color wheels that are stashed all over the internet. Those that include tertiary and analogous colors are designed more for middle, if not high school and tend to overwhelm those that are just starting out.

The solution? I created my own color wheel just to keep color concepts very basic. Just one easy-to-read graphic that shows the primary and secondary colors, and where the warm and cool colors are. That’s plenty to focus on when you are just starting out.

Need a quick overview? Primary colors are colors that can’t be mixed from other colors. They are red, yellow, and blue. Secondary colors are colors that result from mixing two primary colors. They are orange, purple and green. Things get more complex if you continue learning about color theory, but for really young ones, these are the simple ideas that I focused on over the years.