The Best Coloring Tools for Children

Children Love to Color

Many different coloring tools are available, including crayons, colored pencils, various paints, and a staggering array of different types of markers. In spite of massive marketing to parents and kids, the truth is most children would be happy coloring with simple tools. Let’s take a look at some different options available today.

Before We Start

The first thing to consider is possible toxicity. Any coloring tools children use should be nontoxic. Please see the article linked below* for information on safety and what to look for on art supply labels for your children.

Crayons

Children usually begin coloring with crayons. Crayons are great for toddlers and beginners. They are color-dense and roll over paper easily, making them satisfying to use. Toddlers love to scribble with crayons, and revel in the splash of beautiful colors and the pleasure of free muscle movement. This exercise of scribbling is vital to begin the process of developing fine motor control.

As a child refines motor control and moves past the scribbling stage, the desire to communicate what is in the mind to the hand will arise (hand-eye coordination). This may happen at varying ages.

Toddlers love to explore the world, taking in all the wonderful new things to see and experience. Children will start to express these new experiences and record these new things by drawing them. For example, four-year-old children often draw pictures of the family house, parents and siblings. They may draw animals and household pets. They draw what they see and experience.

Crayons make a great start, whether for coloring or drawing. But they are generally too thick and awkward for children to produce fine detail in drawing. They may still like coloring with crayons, and doing so will help them refine motor control as they work to stay within the drawing lines.

When my niece and nephews were very young, I would color with them. They all had coloring books, and I would color on one side of a coloring book spread, and one of them would color on the opposite side. While doing this, they would notice how I colored, the time I took to color neatly, how I would sometimes shade things, or even add my own touches that weren’t in the pictures. They all loved this time together, and without me saying anything about what I was doing, or trying to be didactic, or make suggestions to them, they were able to absorb new ideas and exciting techniques freely at their own pace.

—Diana Fisher

Paints

There are different types of paints available for children. In general, painting is great for young children to explore abstract designs or pictures with simple shapes.

Finger Paint

Very young children like finger painting. It’s fun and messy. It involves free muscle movement and sensory exploration.

Close supervision is suggested, as young children may try to eat the paint or simply put their paint-laden fingers in their mouths. Even if the label says nontoxic, there may be pigments or preservatives that aren’t safe.

There are emerging companies producing veggie/vegan finger paint using vegetables for color instead of dyes. It’s also possible to find homemade recipes for finger paint online, and this may be your best option as you will know exactly what the ingredients are.

Watercolors

Most children have painted with watercolor sets. They come in trays of several colors and are very easy to use.

Watercolors are applied with paint brushes after mixing water into the dried paint in the trays. They are good for abstract compositions and “watery” pictures without fine detail. They do require special paper that won’t buckle when wet paint is applied; for example, thin paper such as printer or copy paper would not be appropriate for watercolors. Thicker, heavyweight paper would be better.

Children tend to muddy the paint colors in the tray when watercoloring. This is due to not rinsing the brushes out well in water between switching colors. To keep the colors bright and clean, make sure to emphasize proper brush cleaning.

Tempera

Elementary classrooms usually have tempera paint on hand for art projects, so most children are familiar with it. The paint colors are dense and they cover areas easily.

Tempera paint is good for pictures that incorporate simple shapes without great detail. This does depend upon two things: the skill level of the child’s ability to wield and use fine brushes, and the quality of the fine brushes. If your child is precocious and likes tempera paint (or any other paint for that matter), we suggest providing good paper and finer quality brushes. The brushes typically made for children are of lower quality, but in general serve to spread paint around fairly well for most early childhood projects.

Other Paint Mediums

There are traditional paints such as acrylic and oil. Acrylic would be appropriate for older kids, and oils should only be used by responsible adults.

If you do come across other kid-friendly paints your children would like to try, make sure to research their safety.

Markers

We do not recommend markers for coloring. Kids like to use markers, but the reason they are fun is one of the reasons they are not good coloring tools. The colors are very easy to apply, with good coverage. But the density of the color and solvents (whether water or chemical) saturate paper to the point the colors can become too dark. Using proper paper and paring it with your marker choice might solve this issue.

The second reason is that we don’t trust the nontoxic claims. Certainly never give permanent or alcohol/solvent-based markers to children, which can lead to health problems. Also avoid any scented markers which are sometimes marketed to children.

See source below on what to look for on art supply labels regarding safety.*

Colored Pencils

We love colored pencils. Once a child has gained some fine motor control, developed the small muscles in their hands and fingers, and refined hand-eye coordination, colored pencils offer wonderful opportunities.

Colored pencils can easily achieve much greater detail. They can be layered and mix well together (tip: lighter colors first; darkest colors last). They can be used with a light touch or with more pressure for denser, waxy coverage.

Their finer points make coloring a calmer, more centered experience. Crayons or markers, for example, due to the bigger tips and wider coverage, allow children to rush through creating a picture. Colored pencils will take more time, which children will benefit from doing. It is a more contemplative, purposeful creative experience.

We recommend good quality colored pencils that are softer (many colored pencils are very hard which makes them difficult to use), with dense color. Crayola colored pencils are very good (we are not affiliated—we just searched around for a good nontoxic set for kids).

In Conclusion

We like to keep things simple. Good, basic art supplies for your children are the best in our opinion.

New products are cropping up all the time, and we are not aware of all the possible children’s coloring tools in the marketplace. We recommend avoiding trends and advertising hyperbole. The exceptions are new products that focus on being environmentally and personally safer and kinder, and we applaud that.

*Safety Source

From Green America:
Article: Are your Art Supplies Toxic?

This article lists what to look for on labels and covers vital information about toxins in art supplies.

https://greenamerica.org/green-living/toxic-art-supplies