Art Therapy Activities You Can Do With a Coloring Page

Most of the art therapy activities you'll find online need clay, canvas, or a cupboard full of supplies. These don't. Everything below works with a printed coloring page, something to color with, and ten minutes.

One thing worth saying plainly up front: art therapy proper is a licensed profession, done with a trained therapist who knows you. What follows is not that. These are art-therapy-inspired exercises — simple creative activities borrowed from the same ideas, that anyone can try at home, in a classroom, or around a kitchen table. Nobody is treating anything. If an exercise starts to stir something you'd rather not sit with, stop and go color a flower.

Ten art therapy activities using coloring pages

Each one below has what you need, what to do, and who it tends to suit. Mix and match. None of them take longer than a TV episode.

1. Color your feelings

You need: any page with several distinct sections. A mandala or a patterned page works best.

Do this: Before you start, assign a color to four or five moods — yellow for cheerful, grey for flat, red for irritated, whatever fits. Then fill the page according to how the day actually went, section by section, in rough proportion. A mostly-grey page with one bright corner is a legitimate result.

Suits: adults who find it easier to point at something than to describe it. Also good as a daily habit.

2. The mood palette

You need: a page and a full set of pencils or markers.

Do this: Pick exactly three colors that feel like right now — not your favorites, not what matches. Put the rest of the set away. Color the whole page using only those three.

Suits: anyone who freezes at too much choice. The limit does the deciding for you, which is most of the relief.

3. Two-page contrast

You need: two identical printouts of the same page.

Do this: Color the first as "the loud version" — bright, fast, heavy pressure, no care for the lines. Color the second as "the quiet version" — soft, slow, muted. Same drawing, two completely different pages. Put them side by side afterwards.

Suits: people who like a bit of structure and a visible result. It's also a satisfying thing to photograph.

4. Finish someone else's page

You need: two or more people, one half-finished page each.

Do this: Color for five minutes, then swap. Finish what the other person started, working with their color choices instead of overriding them. No commentary on their choices while you work.

Suits: families, siblings, and any group where cooperation is the actual point. Expect laughing.

5. Deliberate imperfection

You need: a page you don't care about, and permission to ruin it.

Do this: Color outside the lines on purpose. Cross the boundaries deliberately, let colors bleed into each other, leave gaps. The rule is that you're not allowed to fix anything.

Suits: perfectionists, and anyone who has ever thrown out a page over one stray mark. It is harder than it sounds, which is rather the point.

6. The gratitude page

You need: a page with roughly five to ten separate areas.

Do this: Assign one section per good thing from the past week — a decent coffee, a text from a friend, a quiet Tuesday. Color that section while you think about it. Small things count; small things are mostly what there is.

Suits: adults and teens alike, and it's an easy Sunday-evening ritual.

7. The slow page

You need: one detailed page and seven days.

Do this: Color for three to five minutes a day, no more, then put it down mid-section. Come back tomorrow. Finish it at the end of the week.

Suits: anyone who wants a small daily anchor without committing an evening to it. See our post on coloring for stress and anxiety if you want to build this into a longer habit.

8. Blackout

You need: a busy page and a dark marker or heavy pencil.

Do this: Choose one shape on the page you want to keep — a single leaf, one petal, one window. Color over everything else in dark, solid strokes until only that shape is left showing.

Suits: older teens and adults. It's oddly absorbing, and the finished page usually looks better than you expect.

9. Warm-up scribble

You need: one scrap sheet, 60 seconds.

Do this: Before touching the real page, scribble hard on scrap paper for a minute. No shapes, no meaning, just movement. Then bin it and start properly.

Suits: everyone, especially anyone who stares at a blank page and can't begin. Use it as the opening move for any of the other exercises.

10. The collaborative mural

You need: one large page printed across several sheets, or several pages taped together, plus a table.

Do this: Everyone works on their own section at the same time, then the sheets get taped together at the end. Agree on two or three shared colors beforehand so the finished piece hangs together.

Suits: classrooms, care homes, youth groups, and family gatherings. If you want it larger than one sheet, most printer drivers have a "poster" or "tile" setting that splits a single page across several sheets to tape together — and our guide to printing coloring pages at home covers getting the sizing and margins right.

Adapting art therapy activities for teens

Teenagers can smell a feelings exercise from across the room, and the fastest way to lose one is to announce what an activity is for.

• Lead with the activity, never the debrief. "Color this using only three colors" lands. "Let's explore your emotions through color" does not.
• Skip the sharing circle. If they want to say something about the page, they will. If they don't, the page was still worth doing.
• Pick pages that aren't childish. Geometric patterns, skulls, botanical line art, architecture. Nothing with a cartoon face on it.
• Offer the blackout and the deliberate-imperfection exercises first. They have a bit of edge to them and don't feel like homework.
• Let them keep it or bin it. Ownership of the outcome matters more at that age than the exercise itself.

The same applies to any coping skills activity you're introducing to a teenager — the less it's framed as a coping skill, the better it tends to go.

Running these in a group

If you're leading a session in a school, community group, or care setting, a few practical things make the difference:

• Print more than you need. Someone will want a second copy, and someone will want to start over. Bold, simple outlines print reliably and work for mixed abilities — our patterns and mandalas and flowers and gardens pages are safe defaults, and bold and easy pages suit anyone with shaky hands or low vision.
• Give a time limit, then extend it. "Ten minutes" gets people started far better than an open-ended session.
• Put music on. Silence makes people self-conscious and makes the room feel like a test.
• Never go round the table asking what someone's page means. Ask what they'd call it, if you ask anything at all.
• Say up front that stopping is allowed. Some people will just want to color a landscape quietly, and that's a fine use of the hour.

For younger children, keep it to the warm-up scribble, the gratitude page, and the mural, with simple kids' pages.

What these are and aren't

These exercises are pleasant, cheap, and easy to repeat — which is most of why they're worth doing. They're also just activities, not care, and no coloring sheet replaces support from a professional who actually knows you.

Beyond that, use them loosely. Swap the rules, invent your own constraints, ignore anything that doesn't suit you. The best version of any of these is the one you'll actually do on a Wednesday evening.

Related reading

• Coloring for Adults: How It Eases Stress and Anxiety
• Bold and Easy Coloring Pages
• How to Print Coloring Pages at Home