Give it a go!

Why not try mixing colours without paint or a brush? Slide the coloured glass panes on top of one another and see what happens. How many colours can you create?

What happened?

When the glass panes overlap, the colours change. New shades appear where they meet. You’ve created something new just by moving some coloured glass around!

Why?

The white light from the lamps contains light in all the colours of the rainbow. Each glass pane filters out light of a certain colour and lets the rest of the light through. When you place several glass panes on top of each other, several types of light disappear and the colour changes. This is called subtractive colour mixing because we remove colours to create new shades. If you want to discover additive colour mixing, you can explore the Colour Shadows experiment.

Try again!

What happens if you only cover a small area? Or use all the glass panes? Experiment to find out! There are no right or wrong answers here, just new colours to discover.