A horse with six legs, a purple sun and a family portrait where everyone appears to be floating… Children’s drawings may not always follow the rules of perspective, proportion or reality, but that is precisely what makes them so valuable.
More than 1 660 primary school learners across four Gauteng schools recently had the opportunity to put their imaginations onto paper as part of a mass colouring experience built around one simple invitation to: “Let Your Colour Out”.
Rather than being given a picture to copy or told which colours belonged where, each learner received their own section of a much larger mural design. Armed with BIC colouring pencils, crayons, markers and pens, the children were encouraged to make their piece completely their own.
Some carefully planned every colour. Others filled their section with energetic lines, bold patterns and combinations that perhaps only made sense to them. There was no prize for the neatest picture and no pressure to make one learner’s contribution look like another’s.
The experience formed part of BIC South Africa’s 2026 Let Your Colour Out campaign, which encourages children to explore their creativity and express themselves through colour.
Giving children space to create
Creative activities can sometimes be treated as something children do after the ‘serious’ schoolwork has been completed. However, research increasingly suggests that drawing, colouring and creating are an important part of how children learn.
When a child decides whether a dragon should have two wings or 12, they are doing more than decorating a page. They are making decisions, testing ideas and imagining different possibilities. This process is linked to divergent thinking, which is the ability to explore several possible answers instead of searching for one correct solution.
Primary school is an especially valuable time to encourage this freedom because children are naturally curious and often far less concerned than adults about whether their ideas are realistic.
“At this age, children are constantly asking questions, experimenting and finding their own ways to understand the world,” says Amy Whittam, stationery marketing manager at BIC South Africa. “When we give children the freedom to create without worrying about getting the answer wrong, we help them build confidence in their own ideas. It was wonderful to see this happening on such a large scale.”
Hundreds of ideas, one shared artwork
The scale of the experience took colouring far beyond the usual workbook, worksheet or single sheet of paper. Each child worked on an individual piece, but every mark, pattern and unexpected colour choice would eventually become part of the larger school mural.
This gave learners the freedom to express themselves while also contributing to something they shared with their classmates and wider school community. Global research suggests that creative environments can support co-operation, empathy and emotional resilience. When children create alongside one another, they begin to see that different ideas can exist together without one being more valuable than another.
One child may carefully colour between every line. Another may cover every available space in green. Both children are making choices, communicating and contributing something personal to the final artwork.
The activity also created another way for learners to express themselves. Not every child finds it easy to communicate their feelings or ideas through words, but colour, drawing and pattern can give them another language.
“Every child has colour inside them,” says Whittam. “They don’t need to be taught creativity. They need the space, freedom and confidence to unleash it. So often, children are asked to create within small spaces like a worksheet, a colouring book or a single page. This project gave them something much bigger. It gave an entire school the chance to create together, while still allowing every child to leave their own mark.
“Every section told us something about the child who created it. No two pieces were the same, and that individuality is exactly what we wanted to celebrate. Creativity is not about producing one correct result. It is about giving children the confidence to show us how they see the world.”
The creativity continues in August
Although the colouring activities have come to an end, the children’s work is only beginning its next chapter. The individual pieces are now being brought together and adapted into large-scale murals that will become permanent features at the participating schools.
When the murals are revealed this month, learners will be able to find the section they helped create and see how their ideas became part of something much bigger.
For the schools, the murals will be a colourful reminder that creativity does not belong only to children who are considered ‘good at art’. It belongs to every child who is willing to experiment, imagine and add their own mark.
They will also preserve something that can be difficult to capture, the wonderfully unfiltered way children see the world before they begin worrying about whether everything looks realistic or stays perfectly inside the lines.
From a distance, the experience might have looked like more than 1 660 children simply spending time with BIC colouring pencils, crayons, pens and markers. In reality, it gave each learner the freedom to make decisions, express an idea and see that their contribution mattered.
In August, these hundreds of individual ideas will take their place on the school walls for everyone to see.
Sometimes meaningful learning looks like a quiet classroom and carefully completed work. Other times it looks like more than 1 660 children, hundreds of colours and a horse that absolutely does not need four legs.
Follow the colouring journey across BIC’s social media channels: Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
