Strategies

Identity Palette

3 Min Read  •  Visual Art Strategy

Most first-week introductions tell you almost nothing true about a person. This one is different.

This week’s strategy, Identity Palette, uses one of visual art’s most powerful tools to begin answering it. Students select colors that represent different aspects of who they are, build a personal palette, and then look for the places where their colors overlap with someone else’s.

It sounds simple. It goes deep fast.

For a digital version, students can build their palette using free tools like Canva or Adobe Color. For something hands-on and low-tech, a stack of paint strip samples from your local hardware store is one of the best classroom supplies you will ever pick up for free.

Step 1: Introduce Color as Language

Open with a brief conversation about how colors carry meaning, emotion, and personal association. Ask: what color feels like home to you? What color makes you feel confident? What color reminds you of something you love? There are no wrong answers, and that is the whole point.

Step 2: Build the Palette

Students select 4 to 6 colors and assign each one to something meaningful about themselves: a value, a feeling, a place, a person, a memory, or a part of their identity they want others to know.

Step 3: Write the Key

For each color in their palette, students write one sentence explaining the connection. These sentences are the heart of the strategy. Encourage specificity: not “blue because I like the ocean” but “blue because my grandfather took me fishing every Saturday until I was eight.”

Step 4: Share and Find Connections

Students move through the room (or share in small groups) looking for colors they have in common with classmates and comparing their reasons. Two students may both choose green but for entirely different reasons. That conversation is about community building.

Discussion prompts:

  • Which color in your palette feels most like you?
  • What surprised you about someone else’s palette?
  • What did you discover you share with someone you did not expect?

Cross-Curricular Applications

🧪 Science – Explore how color is produced by wavelengths of light, then have students connect the physics of their favorite color to the personal meaning they assigned it.

➗ Math – Have students represent the proportions of their palette as a pie chart or ratio, comparing how much of their identity each color takes up.

📚 ELA – Ask students to build a color palette for a character from a novel and compare it to their own, using textual evidence to justify each color choice.

🌍 Social Studies – Research how color symbolism shifts across cultures and time periods, then have students consider how their own palette might read differently in another part of the world.

🎶 Music – Ask students to choose a song or sound for each color in their palette, then explain the connection the way they explained their color choices.

Want More?

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