Many children love draw, many others love coloring! This last activity is less difficult and it does not put them in a position to feel inadequate if they fail to make a beautiful drawing.
Coloring they can free the imagination and this can be a first step towards the design. The coloring also does not require much intellectual effort and consequently renders them more relaxed.
Explain the importance of doing it with calm and precision will help him to get used to doing the small things well and with attention.
Drawing and coloring is also a way for the child to act out fears, anxieties or desires, in a few words emotions and feelings than with words can not express. Then we learn to interpret the designs trying to comment on them with the author to try to understand the motives that inspired him.
Do not worry too much if they use color in a manner inconsistent with reality: whether they color a dog blue or a cat green.
Let them express their liveliness, their curiosity, their being children. To do this you need to create an environment suitable to "paint": they does not paint on the sofa, they do not paint on the bed or on the fine tables, doing so it would only make you feel anxious and your anxiety will be transmitted to the small "artist."
Where the child paints, sometimes can happen to find the tablecloth or the table botched: call up your little messy to take more care, but without getting angry; if you do not want to risk worsening the damage it is better that you clean, but not forbid the child to color making him do other. Just put a nice piece of newspaper between the drawing and the table cloth to avoid disappointment. There are also various types of aprons, more or less impermeable, with which safeguard the clothes.
Often we allow the markers very soon, they have the advantage that we should not pin them as pencils and they have a very clear and vivid tract (just how they like), but be careful because the markers can be more dangerous: be careful that your child do not put in their mouth the caps. Eventually you insist because the markers are all closed, they will last longer and your child will take this good habit since childhood.
Both pencils and markers are sold in boxes in which they are not arranged in a random order: they remember a rainbow and can be an interesting game put them in the same order in order to learn soon the color tones, the cold tones and the hot ones.
There are colors that are used more than others. Check whether it makes sense to buy only those exhausted, rather than a whole new box. There are specialized shops selling colors individually, a bit expensive, but definitely excellent quality and still cheaper than a new box.
You can print to your child the coloring that you find on this site, try to print two identical designs and color it together with your child, take counsel about the colors to use, stimulate him to add other elements to your design, compliment with him for color combinations expressed and so on.
Then, if the child persists in spending a lot of time to color, try to get him to draw what he wants to color, maybe copying, the rest of the main rule to learn to draw is to copy.