50 Art Therapy Activities
for Adults

(Organized by What You’re Feeling)
A 45-minute art session lowers stress hormones in 3 out of 4 adults — and it doesn’t matter if you’ve never held a paintbrush (Kaimal et al., Drexel University / Art Therapy journal, 2016).
Most art therapy activity lists organize by medium — painting, drawing, collage. This one organizes by how you feel, because that’s how you actually arrive at the page. You don’t wake up thinking “I want to paint today.” You wake up anxious, or numb, or hollowed out by grief. This guide meets you there. These 50 activities require no artistic training, no special talent, and in most cases no more than $15 in supplies. Pick the section that matches where you are right now. That’s all.
TL;DR: Art therapy activities reduce stress hormones in 75% of adults after just 45 minutes of art-making, regardless of skill level (Kaimal et al., Drexel University, 2016). These 50 activities are organized by emotional goal — anxiety, depression, trauma, self-love, and mindfulness — so you can pick exactly what you need and start today without a therapist.

What Does the Research Actually Say About Art Therapy?

Art therapy produces measurable improvements in anxiety, depression, and stress — not as a nice supplement to real treatment, but as a clinically validated intervention in its own right. A 2024 meta-analysis published in JAMA Network Open covering 50 randomized controlled trials (n=2,766) found a standardized mean difference of 0.38 across health outcomes (Joschko et al., JAMA Network Open, 2024). That’s a moderate effect — comparable to established psychological treatments.
The distinction between “art therapy” and “doing art” comes down to intent, not skill. Art therapy is purposeful creative expression aimed at emotional processing. You don’t need training. You don’t need to make something beautiful. The cortisol mechanism — the way focused creative activity activates the parasympathetic nervous system — responds to intent and attention, not aesthetics.
Mental disorders account for 12% of the global disease burden, yet more than 45 million people lack access to adequate mental health care (PMC9472646, 2022). Art therapy is increasingly recognized as one way to close that gap — accessible, low-cost, and effective across populations.
Art Therapy's Effect on Mental Health Outcomes
“Clinical research consistently shows art therapy produces meaningful improvements in anxiety and depression. A 2024 meta-analysis of 50 randomized controlled trials (n=2,766) published in JAMA Network Open found art therapy produced a standardized mean difference of 0.38 (95% CI 0.26–0.51) across health outcomes — a moderate effect comparable to established psychological interventions (Joschko et al., 2024).”

What Art Therapy Activities Help Most with Anxiety?

Art therapy reduces anxiety through repetitive, focused creative tasks that activate the parasympathetic nervous system — similar to meditation but more accessible for people whose minds won’t quiet. Mandala coloring, for example, significantly reduced state anxiety scores. The repetitive, structured format is what drives that effect.

What’s actually happening in your body during these activities? Your nervous system reads slow, deliberate physical motion as a signal of safety. When your hands are busy in a predictable, rhythmic way, your brain finds it harder to stay in threat-mode.
Mandala coloring
Art Therapy's Effect to decrease cortisol

The 10 Art Therapy Activities for Anxiety:

The 10 Art Therapy Activities for Anxiety:
1. Mandala Coloring
  • Materials: Pre-printed mandala (free online), colored pencils or fine-tip markers
  • How to do it: Print a mandala. Choose colors by instinct, not plan. Work from the center outward. Fill each section completely before moving on.
  • Why it helps: The structured, repetitive motion quiets the default mode network — the part of the brain responsible for rumination and worry.
2. Worry Stone Painting
  • Materials: A smooth flat stone (from outside or a craft store), acrylic paint, a fine brush
  • How to do it: Hold the stone in your non-dominant hand. Paint a word, symbol, or pattern on it that represents something you want to release. Let it dry. Keep it in your pocket.
  • Why it helps: Physical grounding objects anchor the nervous system. The act of painting something onto a stone externalizes an internal fear.
3. Breath Watercolor
  • Materials: Watercolor paints, watercolor paper, a medium brush
  • How to do it: Dip your brush in paint and water. Inhale slowly. On the exhale, make one slow stroke across the page. Inhale again. Repeat. Let the strokes layer and overlap.
  • Why it helps: This ties creative output directly to breath regulation — the fastest route to parasympathetic activation.
4. Safe Place Drawing
  • Materials: Pencils, colored pencils, any paper
  • How to do it: Close your eyes and imagine a place where you feel completely safe — real or imagined. Open your eyes and draw it in as much detail as you can. Include textures, light, weather.
  • Why it helps: Visualization of safety interrupts the anxiety loop. Drawing it solidifies the mental resource.
5. Emotion Color Wheel
  • Materials: A blank circle divided into sections, watercolors or markers
  • How to do it: Assign a color to each emotion you’ve felt today. Fill the wheel. No wrong answers — you’re the only authority on what your anxiety looks like.
  • Why it helps: Naming and color-coding emotions reduces their intensity by engaging the prefrontal cortex.
6. Texture Collage
  • Materials: Glue stick, paper, and any textured materials — fabric scraps, tissue paper, sandpaper, foil, cotton
  • How to do it: Before gluing anything, spend 2-3 minutes touching each material. Notice what each texture feels like. Then arrange and glue.
  • Why it helps: Sensory grounding through touch is one of the most direct routes out of anxious thought spirals.
7. Zentangle Doodling
  • Materials: Fine-tip black pen, white paper (index cards work well)
  • How to do it: Divide your paper into irregular sections with curved lines. Fill each section with a different repeating pattern — dots, spirals, crosshatching, waves. No mistakes possible.
  • Why it helps: Zentangle was literally developed as a structured meditation practice. The repetition is the point.
8. Clay Squeezing and Sculpting
  • Materials: Air-dry clay or even playdough
  • How to do it: Start by squeezing, pressing, and kneading the clay without any intention of making something. After 5 minutes, shape it into whatever feels right.
  • Why it helps: Tactile pressure on the hands has a documented calming effect on the nervous system — the same mechanism behind weighted blankets.
9. Scribble Drawing and Transformation
  • Materials: Crayons or markers, large paper
  • How to do it: Set a timer for 60 seconds. Scribble as fast and chaotically as you want — let it be messy. Then look at the scribble and find shapes in it. Slowly transform those shapes into something recognizable.
  • Why it helps: The initial release of the scribble discharges physical tension. Finding order in chaos is an active metaphor for managing anxiety.
10. The Feelings Jar
  • Materials: Colored paper, scissors, a glass jar or cup
  • How to do it: Tear colored paper into small pieces. On each piece, write one feeling you’re carrying right now. Fold them and place them in the jar. You can read them later or not.
  • Why it helps: Physically containing emotions in an external object creates psychological distance from their intensity.
When I first tried the emotion color wheel, I expected to reach for red or black. I picked yellow — and realized my anxiety lives in my chest like something bright and frantic, not dark and heavy. That small moment of self-knowledge is exactly what art therapy is for.
— Client review

What Art Therapy Activities Help with Depression?

Art therapy reaches feelings that talk therapy sometimes can’t — not because words fail us, but because some emotional states don’t have language yet. Visual expression bypasses that block.
Depression often collapses the world into a smaller and smaller radius. These activities are designed to gently expand it through the act of making something that wasn’t there before.

The 10 Art Therapy Activities for Depression:

1. Self-Portrait
  • Materials: Mirror, pencil or charcoal, any paper
  • How to do it: Look at yourself in the mirror. Draw exactly what you see today — not an idealized version, not a cartoon. Include the tired eyes if they’re there.
  • Why it helps: Honest self-portraiture is an act of witnessing. Depression often involves a distorted or invisible sense of self. This makes you visible to yourself.
2. Gratitude Collage
  • Materials: Old magazines, scissors, glue, paper
  • How to do it: Cut only images that represent something you’re genuinely grateful for — not what you think you should be grateful for. Arrange and glue them.
  • Why it helps: Visual engagement with positive associations activates reward pathways that depression suppresses.
3. Color Mixing to Match Mood
  • Materials: Acrylic or watercolor paints, palette, paper
  • How to do it: Mix colors until you find the exact color of how you feel right now. Not “sad = blue.” Your actual feeling. Paint a swatch and label it.
  • Why it helps: Precision in naming and externalizing emotional states reduces their power. You’re the expert on your own interior.
4. Automatic Drawing
  • Materials: Pen or pencil, paper
  • How to do it: Set a timer for 5 minutes. Let your hand move across the page without any intention. Don’t lift the pen. Don’t plan. Don’t evaluate.
  • Why it helps: Automatic drawing bypasses the inner critic — the relentless evaluative voice that depression amplifies.
5. Letter to Yourself Illustrated
  • Materials: Paper, pen, colored pencils
  • How to do it: Write yourself a compassionate letter — what would you say to a close friend who felt the way you feel? Then draw a small image for each paragraph.
  • Why it helps: Self-compassion writing combined with visual expression engages both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously.
6. Black-and-White to Color Transformation
  • Materials: Grey or black pencil, colored pencils or watercolors, paper
  • How to do it: Start a drawing in grey only. After 10 minutes, slowly introduce one color. Then another. Let color re-enter at its own pace.
  • Why it helps: The gradual introduction of color is a physical metaphor for the slow return of feeling — one most people find genuinely moving.
7. The Hope Box
  • Materials: A small box (shoebox works), decorative paper, images, words, small meaningful objects
  • How to do it: Decorate the outside however you like. Fill the inside with images, written phrases, and small objects that represent hope or things worth staying for. Return to it on difficult days.
  • Why it helps: Having a physical object that embodies hope creates an external resource for moments when internal resources are depleted.
8. Expressive Brushstrokes on Large Paper
  • Materials: Large paper (newspaper or butcher paper), thick brushes, acrylic or house paint
  • How to do it: Tape paper to the floor. Choose a color. Make large, full-body strokes — arms wide, back involved. No small movements.
  • Why it helps: Depression contracts the body. Large physical movement during creative expression directly counters that contraction.
9. Found-Object Assemblage
  • Materials: Objects collected from your home or a 10-minute walk outside
  • How to do it: Gather 10-15 objects. Arrange them on a flat surface into a composition that feels like you right now. Photograph it.
  • Why it helps: Getting outside, even briefly, and making something from what you find there is a quiet act of re-engagement with the world.
10. Before-and-After Mood Painting
  • Materials: Watercolors or acrylics, two sheets of paper
  • How to do it: Before you begin, paint an abstract image of how you feel right now — colors, shapes, anything. Set it aside. Create freely for 20 minutes. Then paint a second image of how you feel now. Compare.
  • Why it helps: Research consistently shows mood improves during creative activity. Seeing the before and after makes that shift concrete and memorable.

What Art Therapy Activities Help with Trauma and Grief?

Art therapy is particularly suited to trauma and grief because it creates physical distance from painful memories — you externalize the experience onto paper or canvas rather than reliving it verbally. This matters enormously for trauma, where verbal recounting can retraumatize. 
If you’re working with severe trauma, consider working alongside a therapist — even if just occasionally. These activities are safe for self-directed use, but a professional can help you process what surfaces.
Long term effect of Art therapy for Veterans
“Long-term art therapy produces significantly greater gains than short-term treatment for trauma and grief. A study of 222 military veterans with TBI and PTSD found that long-term art therapy (average 237 sessions) improved personal insight resolution from 38.3% to 76.6% (p=0.0002) and trauma processing from 40.9% to 65.9% (p=0.0278), compared to minimal gains in short-term groups (Walker et al., PMC10013461, 2023).”

The 10 Art Therapy Activities for Trauma and Grief:

1. The Memory Box
  • Materials: A box or tin, images (printed or cut from magazines), fabric scraps, pressed flowers, written words, glue
  • How to do it: Create a collage inside and outside the box dedicated to a person, relationship, or time that you’ve lost. Include sensory details — textures they associated with, colors they loved.
  • Why it helps: Physical memorialization of loss externalizes grief and honors what mattered.
2. Bridge Drawing
  • Materials: A large horizontal sheet of paper, any drawing tools
  • How to do it: Draw where you are now on the left side of the page. Draw where you want to be on the right side. Draw the bridge connecting them in the middle — it can be literal or abstract.
  • Why it helps: Bridge drawing is a clinically used art therapy assessment and intervention. It externalizes the therapeutic journey and makes it legible.
3. Safe Container Art
  • Materials: Any medium — drawing, painting, clay
  • How to do it: Create an image of a container strong enough to hold your hardest feelings. It can be a vault, a deep-sea vessel, a mountain, a titanium box. Make it as solid and detailed as it needs to be.
  • Why it helps: Containment visualization is a standard trauma-stabilization technique. Making it physical amplifies its effectiveness.
4. Body Map
  • Materials: Large paper (at least body-length), markers
  • How to do it: Trace your body outline on the paper (or draw it freehand). Then mark where grief or trauma lives physically in your body — tightness in the throat, weight in the chest, numbness in the hands. Use color, symbols, or words.
  • Why it helps: Trauma is stored somatically. Body mapping makes the body’s emotional experience visible and validates the physical reality of grief.
5. Grief Stones
  • Materials: Stones collected from outside, paint, fine brushes
  • How to do it: Collect several stones on a slow walk. Paint each one with a word, symbol, or image representing something or someone you’ve lost. Keep them somewhere meaningful.
  • Why it helps: Slow walking, touching natural objects, and painting are all individually calming. Together they create a grounding ritual around loss.
6. Releasing Ritual
  • Materials: Watercolors or acrylics, paper
  • How to do it: Paint or draw the thing, person, or feeling causing the most pain right now. Really look at it. Then, slowly, paint over it with a color that feels like relief or peace. Let it take as long as it needs.
  • Why it helps: Overpainting is a visual metaphor for processing — the original feeling doesn’t disappear, it transforms. That’s not denial. It’s integration.
7. Timeline Art
  • Materials: Long horizontal paper, pens, colored pencils
  • How to do it: Map significant life events as a visual timeline — not just losses and hardships, but everything. Include the small joys. Include the moments you almost gave up and didn’t.
  • Why it helps: Trauma often collapses time — the past feels like the present. A visual timeline restores a sense of sequence and survival.
8. Protective Shield Drawing
  • Materials: Paper, colored pencils or markers
  • How to do it: Draw a shield divided into four quadrants. In each section, illustrate one inner resource — a strength, a relationship, a value, a memory that sustains you.
  • Why it helps: Identifying protective factors is central to trauma recovery. The shield makes those resources concrete and portable.
9. Letter to Grief Illustrated
  • Materials: Paper, pen, colored pencils
  • How to do it: Write a letter to your grief as if it were a person — where it came from, what it wants, what you’re learning from carrying it. Then illustrate one scene from the letter.
  • Why it helps: Personifying grief creates distance from it. You can have a relationship with it rather than being consumed by it.
10. Nature Mandala
  • Materials: Natural objects collected on a slow walk — leaves, petals, pebbles, sticks, seeds. A camera or phone.
  • How to do it: Find a flat surface outside. Arrange your collected objects into a circular mandala. Spend at least 10 minutes arranging. Photograph it. Then leave it for the wind.
  • Why it helps: Creating something temporary with natural materials is a practice of letting go. The impermanence is the point.

What Art Therapy Activities Build Self-Love and Self-Worth?

Art therapy builds self-worth by creating a nonjudgmental space for self-expression. The act of making something — and calling it yours, without external evaluation — quietly rebuilds the internal voice of self-acceptance. 
What does self-love actually look like as a creative practice? It looks like staying at the table when the inner critic shows up. It looks like finishing something imperfect and keeping it anyway.
A 2024 study of 7,182 English adults from the Taking Part Survey found arts and crafting participation significantly predicted increased life satisfaction, a sense that life is worthwhile, and happiness above sociodemographic predictors (Frontiers in Public Health, 2024). These effects held after controlling for income, education, and employment status.

The 10 Art Therapy Activities for Self-Love and Self-Worth

1. Inner Critic Portrait
  • Materials: Paper, pencils, colored pencils or markers
  • How to do it: Draw your inner critic as a character — give it a face, a body, a costume, a name. Make it as detailed and specific as you can. Then redraw it as a kinder version: what does it look like when it’s trying to protect you rather than harm you?
  • Why it helps: Externalizing the inner critic as a character reduces its authority. Reimagining it as protective rather than punishing is a cognitive reframe that art makes visceral.
2. Values Map
  • Materials: Large paper, markers, pens
  • How to do it: Draw a map where each “location” represents something that matters most to you — relationships, creativity, growth, rest, community. Add paths between them. Include both the places you visit often and the ones you’ve neglected.
  • Why it helps: Values clarification is foundational to self-worth. Drawing it as a map gives the abstract a physical presence.
3. Strengths Shield
  • Materials: Paper, colored pencils or markers
  • How to do it: Draw a shield divided into four quadrants. In each section, illustrate one personal strength — not a skill, but a quality of character. Draw it, don’t write it.
  • Why it helps: Drawing forces specificity. It’s harder to dismiss “I’m caring” when you’ve drawn a scene in which you were.
4. Self-Compassion Letter Illustrated
  • Materials: Paper, pen, colored pencils
  • How to do it: Write yourself a letter as if you were writing to your own best friend who was struggling exactly as you are. Then illustrate each paragraph with a small image — whatever the words make you picture.
  • Why it helps: Self-compassion writing activates the caregiving system. Adding imagery makes the compassion more embodied and harder to intellectually dismiss.
5. Mirror Art
  • Materials: Mirror, pencils or charcoal, paper
  • How to do it: Draw two versions of yourself side by side: what you see in the mirror on the left, and how you feel on the inside on the right. Don’t try to reconcile them. Just let both exist.
  • Why it helps: The gap between external appearance and internal experience is often where self-worth struggles live. Seeing both versions on paper creates space for curiosity rather than judgment.
6. Affirmation Cards
  • Materials: Index cards, fine-tip markers, colored pencils
  • How to do it: Hand-letter and illustrate 5 affirmations on index cards. Make them specific: not “I am enough” but “I am enough even when I make mistakes at work.” Draw an image that represents each one.
  • Why it helps: Specificity matters in affirmation work. A vague affirmation bounces off the inner critic. A specific one has somewhere to land.
7. The True Self Collage
  • Materials: Old magazines, scissors, glue, paper
  • How to do it: Cut only images that feel like your authentic self — not who you think you should be, not who you present online, but who you actually are when no one’s watching. Arrange and glue.
  • Why it helps: The selection process itself is an act of self-knowledge. You’ll know immediately which images don’t belong.
8. Joy Inventory
  • Materials: Paper, colored pencils or markers
  • How to do it: Illustrate a list of 10 things that bring you genuine joy. Draw each one — don’t write it. No explanation required. Small, quick drawings are fine.
  • Why it helps: Depression and low self-worth erode access to joy. Drawing your sources of joy reconnects you with them in a way that a written list rarely does.
9. Progress Timeline
  • Materials: Long horizontal paper, markers
  • How to do it: Map your personal growth over the last year as a visual journey. Include setbacks as part of the path — not as detours from it. Include the moments you kept going.
  • Why it helps: Self-worth often suffers because we discount our own resilience. A visual record makes it undeniable.
10. Self-Portrait as a Superhero
  • Materials: Paper, pencils, colored pencils or markers
  • How to do it: Draw yourself as a superhero with the powers you wish you had. Make it detailed — costume, powers, origin story. Then ask yourself: which of those powers do you already have in smaller, quieter form?
  • Why it helps: The question at the end is the intervention. Most people find their imagined superpower is a real strength they’ve been minimizing.
Notice that none of these activities ask you to be positive. The inner critic portrait, the mirror art, the progress timeline — they all start by meeting you exactly where you are. That’s what makes them therapeutic rather than performative. Self-love isn’t pretending you feel good. It’s being willing to look honestly, and stay.

Art therapy activities for Self-love in LINA app

The 10 Art Therapy Activities for Mindfulness and Stress Relief

1. Mindful Watercolor Wash
  • Materials: Watercolor paints, watercolor paper, a medium brush
  • How to do it: Load your brush with one color. Paint slow, deliberate horizontal strokes from left to right across the page. No goal, no image. Just the movement of the brush and the spread of color.
  • Why it helps: The simplicity removes any performance pressure. Attention naturally narrows to the physical sensation of painting.
2. Blind Contour Drawing
  • Materials: Pen, paper, a subject to draw (your hand, a plant, a shoe)
  • How to do it: Look only at your subject — never at the paper. Draw what you see without lifting the pen. Don’t worry about accuracy. The drawing will be strange. That’s correct.
  • Why it helps: Blind contour drawing forces present-moment attention by making accuracy impossible. You can only be exactly here, seeing exactly this.
3. Repetitive Pattern Drawing
  • Materials: Fine-tip pen or pencil, paper
  • How to do it: Fill a page with a single repeating pattern — dots, waves, bricks, petals, spirals. Let the repetition carry you forward. No planning required after you choose the pattern.
  • Why it helps: Repetition is the heart of mindfulness practice. The same mechanism that makes mantra meditation work applies here.
4. Nature Observation Sketch
  • Materials: Pencil, sketchbook or paper, one natural object
  • How to do it: Find one natural object — a leaf, a shell, a stone, a branch. Spend at least 15 minutes drawing it as accurately and completely as you can. Look more than you draw.
  • Why it helps: Slow, careful observation is a form of meditation. Most people haven’t truly looked at a single object for 15 uninterrupted minutes. It’s harder and more rewarding than it sounds.
5. Slow Collage
  • Materials: Paper, old magazines, glue
  • How to do it: Tear paper rather than cut it. Arrange pieces without glue first — move them around until the arrangement feels right. Only commit to gluing when you’re ready. There’s no timer.
  • Why it helps: The instruction to go slowly and not commit immediately is itself the intervention. We’re practicing non-urgency.
6. Clay Breathing
  • Materials: Air-dry clay or playdough
  • How to do it: Hold a ball of clay. Shape it slowly on each exhale — let the clay take the impression of your breath’s movement. Don’t plan what you’re making.
  • Why it helps: Synchronized breath and physical movement is the basis of most mindfulness body practices. The clay makes your breath visible.
7. Texture Rubbing
  • Materials: Thin paper, crayons or soft pencils, any textured surface (wood grain, a coin, a leaf, fabric)
  • How to do it: Place the paper over the textured surface. Rub the side of a crayon slowly across the paper to reveal the texture beneath.
  • Why it helps: This is tactile, sensory, and inherently focused. The slow reveal holds attention without effort.
8. Ink Flow Drawing
  • Materials: Ink, a bowl of water, white paper
  • How to do it: Drop a small amount of ink into the water. Watch the shapes it makes as it disperses — don’t interfere. Then recreate what you see on paper.
  • Why it helps: Watching ink move in water is hypnotic. It’s attention-capture without demand. The drawing afterward grounds the observation in your hands.
9. Color Meditation
  • Materials: Watercolors or acrylics, paper
  • How to do it: Choose one color. Spend 10 focused minutes exploring every way it can appear on paper — light, dark, wet, dry, layered, scraped. No image, just color.
  • Why it helps: Constraining the palette eliminates decision fatigue. One color becomes endlessly interesting when you slow down enough to look.
10. Gratitude Sketchbook
  • Materials: Small sketchbook, pencil or pen
  • How to do it: Each day, draw one small moment that was good — a cup of tea, a patch of morning sun, a conversation. No words. Small, quick sketches. Don’t aim for beauty.
  • Why it helps: Daily gratitude practice has strong wellbeing evidence behind it. Drawing rather than writing the moment makes it more vivid and more specifically yours.

What Supplies Do You Actually Need to Start?

You don’t need expensive supplies to start art therapy activities at home. A basic kit under $30 covers most of the 50 activities in this guide — and several activities need nothing at all beyond paper and a pen you already own.

The Essentials ($10–15)
  • Pencils (HB and 2B)
  • White printer paper and a basic sketchbook
  • Watercolor pan set (a basic 12-color set works perfectly)
  • Glue stick
  • Scissors
  • Old magazines (free — check your recycling pile)
Optional Upgrades ($15–30)
  • Air-dry clay (opens up all the tactile activities significantly)
  • Acrylic paint set and a few brushes
  • Oil pastels or chalk pastels
  • Canvas sheets or a small canvas pad
Digital Alternative
You can do Art therapy in LINA Art therapy app. Any drawing app on a tablet or phone also works for your own practice. Procreate and Adobe Fresco are excellent. The basic Notes app sketch tool on an iPhone is genuinely enough for most drawing-based activities.
  • The anxiety, mindfulness, and self-love activities in this guide mostly need only the essentials. The trauma and grief activities sometimes benefit from larger paper or clay — the physicality matters more when you’re processing heavier material.

Frequently Asked Questions

Start With One
Art therapy works because creating something — anything — is inherently self-validating. That’s true whether a therapist guides you or you’re alone at your kitchen table with watercolors and a question you can’t quite put into words yet. The research is clear on the outcomes. But the deeper truth is simpler: making something is an act of saying “I was here. This is what it felt like.”
Start with one activity from whichever category matches how you feel today. You don’t have to do all 50. You don’t even have to finish the one you start. The only rule is that you begin.