It's no secret that young kids have a ton of energy. Coloring can be a great outlet for your child to focus their energy and put their creativity to use. But you can't always bring around coloring books and various drawing utensils with you.

Luckily, there are coloring apps that you can download to a smartphone or tablet! Then, if you're out shopping or stuck in traffic, you can hand off your smartphone or your kid's tablet with a coloring app loaded up. They'll stay entertained with the task at hand, and let you focus on what you need to do.

1. Coloring Games: Color & Paint

Coloring Games provides six unique ways for your child to color. On the home screen, you can select the preferred method of coloring, including Fun Paint, Color Fill, Drawing, Glow Pen, Number Paint, and Water Art.

Both the Fun Paint and Color Fill categories provide a picture for your kid to color, and they can choose between unique drawing utensils and colors to create their art. Alternatively, the Drawing and Glow Pen categories start off with a blank slate, letting your child create anything from their imagination.

Number Paint is a great tool to use if your kid is learning their numbers and colors. They'll see a basic image with numbers on each large section, and then a corresponding marker to the right with a number on it. This category is just like paint-by-number kits for adults.

Finally, Water Art is a neat category for younger children who can't quite comprehend the coloring process just yet. There's an image on the screen, and all you have to do is draw your finger over the display to reveal the watercolor picture.

Download: Coloring Games: Color & Paint for Android | iOS (Free)

2. Bimi Boo Coloring

The only free part of Bimi Boo's Coloring app is the Animals section, with 15 different pictures to color. All the other categories—including Fairy Tales, Underwater, and Dinosaurs—cost $1.99 each, which is pretty comparable to physical coloring books. Or you can spend $7.99 to unlock everything in the app, including extra colors for the drawing tools.

There are seven unique drawing utensils, including a marker, a pencil, a paintbrush, a spray can, a paint can, a sparkly marker, and a patterned marker. You have access to all the colors for the marker and the pencil for free, but the other five utensils only offer three colors for free.

Download: Bimi Boo Coloring for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)

3. Riafy Technologies Coloring

Similar to the Bimi Boo app above, this coloring book app also only offers the Animals category for free, with 19 images in total to color. However, to unlock any other category in this app from Riafy Technologies, it's a one-time fee of $34.99.

Every image comes with a recommended color palette and a completion percentage to know how much you have left to color before the picture is officially ready to go to the art gallery. Each picture utilizes a fill-in color technique where you tap your preferred color followed by the section of the image you want to fill in.

Download: Riafy Technologies Coloring for Android | iOS (Free, premium version available)

4. Coloring Book Games

This coloring book app has a few different tabs to explore. There are Easy and Hard tabs at the bottom of the screen with simple coloring pages, though the options in the Hard section are more intricate. Each of these sections also has a blank page where your child can just draw their own picture.

Then, there's a Guess What? section that hides all the images behind a question mark until you tap one to open it and see what it is. The Glow category has images with outlines that you trace over with a glowing marker to make a cool picture. And finally, there's a Greeting section where your child can color a birthday card, a get well card, and so on for someone special.

Download: Coloring Book Games for Android | iOS (Free, premium version available)

5. Kids Coloring Book

This is one of the best freestyle coloring apps for your kid. Many coloring apps let you simply tap an area of the picture to color in an entire section. While you can do that in this app, you can also choose the paintbrush and simply move your finger where you want to apply the color. This provides your child with a more authentic coloring experience.

Categories to choose a coloring page from include Alphabets, Animals, Fruits, Numbers, Planets, Dinosaurs, Patterns, and Shapes. If your child is currently learning numbers, shapes, or the alphabet, this is a great way to keep them entertained while learning. There's a ton of free content in this app, but if you want even more, you can upgrade to the full version for only $0.99.

If you're at home and you think your kid would enjoy coloring a physical picture, check out one of these great coloring websites that let you print a coloring page.

Download: Kids Coloring Book for Android (Free, premium version available)

6. Astralwire Studio Coloring

The home screen of Astralwire Studio's Coloring app is a bit more grown-up than some of the other apps on this list. There are three simple sections on the home screen: Coloring Pages, Blank Picture, and My Gallery. Then, the Coloring Pages section breaks down further into specific categories, including Alphabet, Animals, Dinosaurs, Monsters, Sweets, Numbers, Universe, and Vehicles.

In the Blank Picture section, your child has a white canvas to draw whatever comes to mind. Or, they can have an outlined picture to color with any of the categories in the Coloring Pages section. They can then look through their colorful creations at any time in the My Gallery section.

There's so much free content here, but some categories in the Coloring Pages section are locked unless you purchase the premium version for $8.99. Or, you can also just remove ads for a one-time fee of $3.99.

Download: Astralwire Studio Coloring for Android (Free, premium version available)

Coloring Is Fun for Everyone

Coloring is a great activity for kids of any age because it inspires creativity, enhances their color vocabulary, and helps them develop fine motor skills. With physical coloring books, there can be a lot of potential mess involved and it's difficult to pack up everything to take it with you. A virtual coloring book app is a simple solution to both of those problems.

And because kids pay attention to what adults do, you could even download a coloring book app for yourself too!