What Your Color Choices Say About You: A Story of Healing, Energy, and Expression

Awe & Wonder Series at Wicked Rae's | Blog 1 of 7

By Jules McVey

The Boy Who Walked In Wearing Black

When we first opened our doors, a woman came in with her grandchildren. One of them was a four-year-old boy who said he hated messy things, whose favorite color was black, and who was hesitant to engage with much of anything.

One afternoon the three of them came in for a splatter session. The little boy was not happy about the idea of paint on his hands. Oakley stepped in to show them how it worked, and instead of demonstrating from a careful distance, she threw paint at the family and encouraged them to get her back.

The little boy became animated in a way no one had seen before.

As the session went on, he shifted from the dark colors he had reached for at the start toward the most vibrant ones, hurling them at Oakley and his grandmother while the whole family laughed. By the end of the hour, he was asking to be held by Oakley, wanted paint to ooze between his fingers, and when the session ended, he gave Oakley one of the longest hugs she has ever received.

The next month the three of them came back and this time, his grandma said, "ask him what his favorite color is?!" When we asked the little boy his favorite color, he said rainbow. His grandmother told us he had been happier since that first visit, that he talked about the experience constantly, and that he had allowed only one painting on his bedroom wall: his splatter painting.

The family painted with us every Sunday in our Painting 101 class for eight months before they moved back to California and for those eight months we all gained more love and laughter in our lives. We closed the class when they left, like the ending of a chapter.

We think about him often when people ask what this work actually does. The research we will cover in this post offers one kind of answer. That little boy offers another. Both are true and neither is complete without the other.

The Most Honest Answer in the Room

At the start of every session at Wicked Rae's, we ask participants to pick their supplemental paint colors. One question often arises: what is your favorite color?

For adults, the answers vary widely. Some hesitate. Some laugh. But among children between the ages of four and seven, the answer is consistent across hundreds of sessions, across different family backgrounds, personalities, and temperaments.

Rainbow. That is their favorite color.

Not a single color. All of them. The full spectrum at once.

Children in this window are giving the most accurate answer available to them. In energy work, the full spectrum corresponds to every chakra open and flowing, nothing suppressed, the whole being in circulation. Children this age have not yet learned to edit themselves into a single frequency. They are still operating from wholeness. They have not yet been taught to make themselves smaller.

That is what this blog is about. It is also the opening of a seven-part series called Awe and Wonder, which uses color, energy, movement, and the practice of making things as a lens for understanding ourselves at a moment when that understanding may be more important than usual.

What Research Says, and What It Confirms

Color preference is not random or purely aesthetic. Andrew Elliot and Markus Maier at the University of Rochester reviewed decades of empirical work and concluded that color carries measurable effects on how people feel, think, and behave. The mechanisms are rooted partly in biology and partly in learned association: some color responses appear to be hard-wired; others built through a lifetime of experience.

A 2020 study by Domicele Jonauskaite and colleagues surveyed 4,598 people across 30 nations and found color-emotion associations remarkably consistent across cultures: white with relief and clarity, blue with calm and trust, pink with tenderness and love, black and gray with depletion and sadness.

What this confirms is something energy practitioners and Reiki healers have understood for a long time. When a person reaches instinctively for a color before the mind has time to deliberate, the body is answering first. The energy field is communicating before the intellect can edit the response. Color preference in a free-choice context is one of the most accessible windows into what a person is carrying in that moment. The colors people choose at Wicked Rae's are not random. They are data. And they are also something more than data. They are the energy field making itself visible

What the Studio Sees

At Wicked Rae's, our Creative Director, Oakley Rae, tracks which colors participants reach for consistently across sessions. The pattern holds across a wide range of people: visitors from Europe, travelers from across the United States, and locals from Seattle, Bellevue, Sammamish, Tacoma, Redmond, and across the Canadian border. In the basic palette, the top choices skew consistently toward pinks, teals, and purples. The heart colors, the bridge colors, the intuitive colors. Among the metallics, blue shimmer, gold shimmer, and white shimmer lead. Among the neons, pink comes first. The choices also cycle seasonally, with periods when reds dominate giving way to periods of light teals, as if the studio is taking a collective emotional temperature. What follows is what those choices carry.

Color as Chakra Readout

In energy work and Reiki practice, color and the chakra system have always been understood as mapping onto each other. Each energy center in the body carries a corresponding color frequency. When someone reaches for a color freely, without deliberation, they may be reaching for the frequency their system needs most in that moment. What follows is offered not as diagnosis but as a way of paying attention. Notice what resonates.

Red

Someone grabbing red first, or using it heavily and with force, is often working from their root chakra. Something primal is looking for somewhere to go: anger, passion, survival energy, a need to feel grounded and powerful. In a corporate workshop, the person who attacks the canvas with red is often carrying suppressed intensity and the painting becomes the first safe place that energy has had to go in a long time. Watch how they apply it. Explosive and liberating reads differently than tight and controlled. That tells you whether the energy is moving or whether it is still looking for permission.

Orange

Orange often signals someone in a creative surge or an emotional processing moment. The sacral chakra governs both creativity and how we relate to our emotions and other people. People moving through relationship transitions, creative blocks breaking open, or significant life changes often reach for orange without knowing why. In splatter and action painting, orange tends to come out in swirling, flowing applications. It wants to move the way emotions move.

Yellow

Yellow often appears when someone is working something out in the mind. The solar plexus chakra governs personal power, identity, and mental clarity. It is also the color people reach for in moments of genuine joy and confidence, so context matters. A single bright yellow thrown across the canvas with abandon reads very differently than yellow applied in careful, measured strokes. Both are worth noticing.

Green

Green is the heart speaking. It appears when someone is in a loving, open, generous state, or when they deeply need that state and are reaching toward it. It comes from people who are grieving, people healing from something relational, and people who are feeling particularly expansive and connected. Green also tends to appear in people with natural healing energy running strongly. If you practice Reiki or work in any healing capacity, you will often feel it in the room before you see it on the canvas.

Blue

Blue choices indicate someone in a communicative or contemplative state. The throat chakra governs expression and truth, and people who feel unheard, who are processing something they have not yet been able to put into words, or who are in a deeply peaceful state often gravitate toward blue. The way someone uses blue tells you something too: poured slowly and deliberately reads differently than flicked and spattered. The throat chakra is about whether someone feels safe expressing themselves freely. The painting style will often mirror that honestly.

Purple and Violet

When someone reaches straight for purple, something spiritually or intuitively significant is often happening for them, even if they cannot yet articulate what it is. This is the third eye and crown chakra range. In workshops, the person who gravitates to purple often has the most surprising emotional response to what they create, because they are painting from a layer that does not usually get invited to the surface.

Black

When someone is drawn heavily to black in a free-choice setting, it deserves gentle attention. It can mean protection mode, grief, or carrying something heavy. It can also simply mean someone who works from a place of depth and contrast, who needs the darkness to make the light visible. In Reiki practice, black in the aura is never a verdict. Neither is black on the canvas. It is information worth holding with care rather than alarm.

White

People who choose white deliberately, who leave the canvas breathing, are often in a clearing or resetting phase. White is energetic openness. It is the person who came in needing to exhale rather than explode

These are not rules. They are invitations to pay a different kind of attention, to yourself and to the people painting alongside you.

What Action Painting Actually Is

People ask about our Action Painting experience and I always tell them the same thing: you will sweat like crazy if you are doing it right.

This is not a gentle creative exercise. It is a full-body release. Participants punch, kick, and knee a paint-covered heavy bag. The paint flies. The canvas is on the floor. Your goggles will fog up within fifteen to twenty minutes and at some point you stop trying to see clearly and you just give in to the experience. That is exactly when it starts working.

For me personally, I put my hands in the colors I was drawn to at the time of the session, and I flick and fling them onto the canvas below without looking. Then I hit the bag. Then I go back to the paint. Over and over for the duration of the session. The music is moving, the black lights are on, and at some point the analytical brain simply stops running the show because the body is too busy.

At forty-five minutes I come out of the splatter room and I see it: a painting that is a complete representation of where I was that day.

Every time it is different.

Every time it is honest in a way that surprises me, because I was not trying to make anything in particular. I was just moving and feeling and letting the colors go where they needed to go.

I breathe deeper when I come out. I feel lighter. Not because anything in my life changed in that forty-five minutes, but because something that had been held got to move. Every person who trusts the process, who stops questioning and just feels the music and the movement and lets their body work it out, reports something similar.

The painting on the floor when it is over is not decoration. It is evidence. It is what the body was carrying, made visible, released onto canvas instead of kept inside.

That is Athletic Expressionism at its core.

What the Pattern Suggests

People from Bellevue, Sammamish, Tacoma, Redmond, and Seattle. From Canada. From visitors traveling through from across the United States and from Europe. Corporate teams from major technology firms alongside community organizations serving people across the income spectrum. The socioeconomic and geographic range is substantial. And the pattern holds across all of it.

There is also something worth noting that resists a simple interpretation: the choices cycle. Across the year, there are periods when reds dominate, followed by periods when light teals take over. Something shifts collectively. The studio acts, in those stretches, almost like a readout of a shared emotional season, which is consistent with what researchers have observed about how physical environment, light, and collective mood states influence color preference at the population level.

What makes this significant is the demographic breadth across which it appears. The Jonauskaite cross-cultural study found that color-emotion associations are remarkably consistent across 30 nations.

What Wicked Rae's observes in a single studio is a smaller but parallel finding: people from very different places, circumstances, and backgrounds, making free color choices in a movement-based creative context, are reaching for the same part of the spectrum. The luminous. The tender. The high-frequency. The colors that correspond, in the research literature and in the energy field traditions, to expression, connection, and the clearing of what has been held.

The studio did not create those needs. The paint made them visible. And the consistency of the pattern across such different people is, on its own, a meaningful piece of data.

Why This Matters Right Now

We are in a period that is making unusual demands on the human spirit. The noise is relentless. The divisions are real. People are exhausted in a way that sleep does not fix, carrying things they cannot always name.

Art has always been what humans do when the world becomes too dense for language. The cave paintings at Lascaux. The blues emerging from the Mississippi Delta. The murals that appear on walls within days of a community's hardest moments. These are not decorations. They are the spirit insisting on expression when words run out. They are the nervous system finding its way through.

In 2019, the World Health Organization synthesized more than 3,000 studies and found the arts play a consistent and measurable role in preventing illness and promoting health across the lifespan. Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, in Your Brain on Art, make the case that aesthetic engagement is a biological need, not a cultural accessory. What energy practitioners and Reiki healers have always known is now supported by data: making something, moving through a creative process, being in the presence of genuine expression does something real and lasting in the human system.

In a room where people are painting with their whole bodies, differences become less load-bearing. You see the person next to you reach for an unexpected color and something in you gets curious instead of defended. You watch someone make something that surprises them and you feel it too. The human stuff comes through.

That is not a small thing right now. That might be one of the most important things.

Awe and wonder are not luxuries in hard times. They are a refusal to stop finding each other interesting. They are how we remember that the person standing next to us has a whole interior life, a whole energy field, a whole color palette we have not seen yet.

What This Series Will Cover

The Awe and Wonder Series is seven posts examining what happens at the intersection of color, movement, energy, and the act of making something. Each post stands alone but builds on the ones before it. No prior knowledge of energy work, chakra traditions, or art practice is required. Research and practitioner wisdom and direct studio observation are each identified as such and allowed to speak to each other.

May 6, 2026: Blog 2: Can You Actually See Someone's Energy?

The technique practitioners have used for decades, the neuroscience of peripheral visual processing, and what happens when you ask your eyes to stop focusing.

May 13, 2026: Blog 3: The People Who Mapped the Human Energy Field

Three practitioners across a century of work who built the vocabulary most energy healers are still using. Their methods, their findings, and why the tradition matters.

May 20, 2026: Blog 4: What Every Aura Color Is Telling You

A color-by-color guide to what the energy field carries in each part of the spectrum, drawing on both cross-cultural research and the major traditions of energy field study.

May 27, 2026: Blog 5: Why You Reach for That Color

The intersection of color psychology, somatic intelligence, and direct studio observation. What changes when you stop choosing colors and let color choose you.

June 3, 2026: Blog 6: Movement Is the Missing Ingredient

What ancient healing traditions and modern somatic research agree on: the body has to move for the energy to shift. What Athletic Expressionism was built to do and why it works.

June 10, 2026: Blog 7: What Reiki Taught Me About a Paint-Splattered Room

Two practices, one territory. The connection between energy healing and full-body expressive art, and why the studio consistently produces what a healing session is designed to produce.

If something in this post raised a question, follow it. The goal of this series is not to deliver conclusions. It is to provide enough information, from enough directions, for you to develop your own sense of what is happening when a person picks up a cup of paint and their body starts to move.

The first session you observe, or participate in, will tell you more than any of these posts can.

Jules McVey 👣

Co‑Founder and CVO, Wicked Rae’s Splatter Studio

Book a session at wickedraes.org · (206) 395-5723 · wickedraesinfo@gmail.com

Sources and Further Reading

All sources cited in this post. Readers are encouraged to consult primary sources directly.

Color Psychology and Neuroscience Elliot, A.J. and Maier, M.A. (2014). Color psychology: Effects of perceiving color on psychological functioning in humans. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 95-120. Jonauskaite, D., Abu-Akel, A., Dael, N., Oberfeld, D., et al. (2020). Universal patterns in color-emotion associations are further shaped by linguistic and geographic proximity. Psychological Science, 31(10), 1245-1260. Kandinsky, W. (1914). Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Dover Publications (translation 1977). Zeki, S. (1999). Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford University Press.

Arts, Health, and Wellbeing Fancourt, D. and Finn, S. (2019). What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. Health Evidence Network Synthesis Report 67. World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe. Magsamen, S. and Ross, I. (2023). Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. Random House. Chatterjee, A. (2014). The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art. Oxford University Press.

Body, Nervous System, and Somatic Processing Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. Levine, P.A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books. Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton. Ogden, P., Minton, K., and Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. W.W. Norton.

Developmental Psychology Erikson, E.H. (1950). Childhood and Society. W.W. Norton. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row.

Energy Field Traditions Brennan, B.A. (1987). Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field. Bantam Books. Leadbeater, C.W. (1927). The Chakras. Theosophical Publishing House. Andrews, T. (1991). How to See and Read the Aura. Llewellyn Publications.