You have been taught to ignore hundreds of thousands of colors

Color books. (Not coloring books.)  I hate them with a passion.  People are confused when I tell them this, citing my being an artist.  

Why I hate Color Books

Red.  Blue.  Green.  Yellow.  Pink.  Maybe purple.  Maybe violet.  Sometimes, if it’s a deluxe version, they’ll have black and white.  All the colors represented with photographs of things.  Red apples, blue robin’s eggs, green leaves.

These things are all the same color, apparently.

Except they aren’t all the same color.  They’re not even close; you can see it with your eyes.  Robin’s eggs are not the same color as blueberries.  Raincoats are not even close to the same color as a duckling.  Don’t get me started on eggplants and violets.

I can't even tell them apart.

It wouldn't be upsetting if we continued to broaden kids' knowledge of colors, but we don't.

“Who decided these five colors are the ones we teach?” I rant.

“Because those are the colors?”  I hear in confused reply.  Really?  Those are all the colors?  What about cyan?  Where’s the puce?  Coral?  Magenta?  Teal?

They all look the same to me.

We don’t ask the height of a building and only accept “tall” or “short”.  We don’t ask  “How many cows?” and only accept values of ten.  This is what we’re doing with colors; eliminating all the in-between, all the variety that actually makes up the majority of colors.

A fellow artist actually replied “Because that’s the color wheel.”  

Hey, guess what.  

The color wheel is made up.  

Fictional.

It’s a quick and dirty guide for people who mix colors, and that’s it.  God did not come down from on high and say that ROY G BIV will now be the only colors we speak of.

“Oo oo!” someone may say, “But ROY G BIV is science!  That proves it!”

No, red orange yellow green blue indigo violet are only gradations in a gradient.  They are arbitrary stopping points.  Kind of like the hours in a day, but a lot less practical.

Here’s what I like to do: throw out all my child’s color books.  Get one of those old sticky-papered photo albums and fill them with cut out pictures from magazines.  Or swipe a fistful of paint chips from the local hardware store.  Better yet, get a hold of a printing shop’s Pantone chart.

Still not all the colors.

Just do something to acknowledge that your child is not crazy for not being able to see the world in more than five colors.  Let them know that we do acknowledge all the in-between, but that colors are so damn subjective, and there are so many of them, we can hardly name them all.

But all of that is secondary to NEVER telling your child that an orangey-red is RED, end of story.  Color is subjective.  When you ask your child “What color are those cows?” and they do not answer the stock “Brown.” just roll with it.  Cows come in lots of colors.  Maybe your child feels that a sienna-golden-tan does not fall under the brown category, but doesn’t know the word for sienna-golden-tan. I don't know the word for sienna-golden-tan.

The correct answer is cow-colored.

Maybe you want to encourage color association, as in:

“This beetle is the same color as our couch!” or “Aren’t those flowers the color of peaches?”

Specificity is the soul of all good communication.

I realize this whole philosophy may seem fruity and impractical.  We teach only a handful of colors to very young children because it is impossible to learn them all, and you have to start somewhere.  Where we go wrong is in not continuing to broaden their color perspectives.

Words do matter.