Artist's Choice - Stephanie Ruble

My choice this week was to do a painting of a football playing moose that I had sketched a couple of years ago (and had always wanted to do something with).

Happy New Year!

Winter Activities - Stephanie Ruble

I painted this image at the beginning of the month for the Winter Activities prompt. Then I got an email from Illustration Friday with the prompt for this week, Phenomenon, which I thought also worked for this painting. It would be a big phenomenon if penguins started to ice skate! Maybe they’d even start a penguin Olympics! Okay, probably not. Here’s my penguin skating with his birdie friends:

Winter Wildlife - Stephanie Ruble

I was thinking about a girl starting to make a snowman when I wondered what would happen if a baby polar bear crossed her path.

I'd like to think they might be friends, that is if the mama bear or the girl's mother are not around.

December challenges and banner

I thought I'd post the challenges and the banner in case anyone wants to start painting before they have a chance to update the site.

December Challenges
1-7: Snowmen (traditional or unusual)
8-14: Winter Wildlife
15-21: Winter Activities
22-31: Artist's Choice To End The Year

The December banner (which inspired the first challenge) of snowmen made out of sand. It's snowing at the beach, which is hard to see in the small version, but will hopefully show up when the banner is live:

Snow Dog - sruble

The Snow Dog image and haiku I did a few years ago seem to fit the topic this week:

Here’s the haiku, in case you can’t read it in the image:

Big white puppy dog,

Looks just like a polar bear,

Likes to hide in snow

I’ve always liked this big white puppy dog and polar bears too.

What’s your favorite animal that likes snow?

oceans: sruble

This is a drawing of a lantern fish that I did for Ripple. It also works for the WaWe oceans prompt. Plus, it cracks me up. Hope it gives you a laugh too!

He's a fishy with a built in flashlight!

Portal to a paisley world - sruble

There's a world out there where everything is paisley, including the whales.

Paisley Whale #1

Paisley Whale #2

I made these digital prints, plus one of a whale from our world, for the Ripple Project (donated art is sold to help the animals in the gulf oil spill). Click here for more info or to purchase these images.

Outdoor Cat Festival - sruble

After I sketched this out, it occurred to me that Dr. Seuss had already drawn a cat wearing a hat. I decided to finish the picture anyway.

These cats are obviously on their way to an outdoor festival. Why else would they be wearing hats? Please visit sruble.com to learn more about my art and projects, or my blog to see more recent art.

Little GREEN Hen - sruble

The prompt for the CBIG blog this month is green, and the prompt for Illustration Friday this week is detective. I thought that any literary detective worth his salt would wonder where green eggs came from, and if he used his sleuthing skills, he’d come up with the answer.

Green eggs come from green chickens. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

The chicken that lays green eggs.

The next question the detective should answer, is which came first, the green chicken, or the green eggs? (I think the green chicken came first. What do you think?)

p.s. The prompt for WaWe this week was The Little Red Hen. Hmm, I’m thinking that history got it wrong. It was really The Little GREEN Hen!

Please visit sruble.com to learn more about my art and projects, or my blog to see more recent art.

greeting card / game - sruble

I’ve been painting tiny pictures lately (see the elephant here and the bunnies here), in order to fit painting for fun into my schedule. My third tiny painting was a girl blowing a bubble with her bubblegum. I broke out my watercolors and colored pencils and painted a picture so horrible that I had to rip it up. Seriously. All it takes to ruin a small watercolor painting is a couple of misplaced brush strokes. However, I still liked the sketch, so I made the bubblegum girl into a digital illustration. The image is 2″ x 2″ like the paintings.

I like how she turned out, but I still wanted to paint something. A picture of a cow blowing a bubblegum bubble seemed like a fun take on the original, and worked out well, because it fits several art prompts all at once (see list below the picture). I used watercolor and colored pencil to make the image. I’m happy with the way both pictures turned out, but I have to say, the more I look at them, the weirder they look. Of course, if you looked at a photograph showing a side view of someone blowing a bubblegum bubble, that would probably look weird after a while, too.

The CBIG prompt this month is fantasy – a cow blowing bubblegum bubbles is definitely fantasy! Bubblegum Girl also works for fantasy. She wants to blow the biggest bubble ever and win the national bubblegum bubble blowing contest (which they actually have – I saw it on TV a couple of years ago).

The Watercolor Wednesdays prompt for last week was to create a greeting card image for a child – the bubblegum sort of looks like a speech balloon, where the cow could say, “Happy Birthday!” Bubblegum Girl also works for this week’s prompt, to illustrate a favorite toy or game … not that gum qualifies as a toy, but trying to blow the biggest bubble could be a game, so I think that counts (or at least it works for me – I went to art school; I can justify anything).

The Illustration Friday prompt this week is brave – that cow is really brave to be blowing bubblegum bubbles. What if it pops and goes all over her face? Bubblegum Girl also works for brave. She knows what will happen if the bubble as big as her head pops!

Are tiny paintings the next big thing? Maybe not, but I’m having fun with them

Character - sruble's Elephant Olympian

Sometimes when I watch the Olympics, I wonder about things, like do elephants have their own Olympic games? And if they do, would they have the same events as our Olympics? Here’s the first event that I imagined from their winter games – Elephant Figure Skating:

What do you think about when you watch the Olympics?

A Puppy and A Wild (Chicken) Thing

When I sat down to paint a child or animal character, this is who showed up.

Happy Puppy!

Does he look familiar? I think he looks a lot like the puppy I did for theFrankenstein prompt and the Halloween character prompt and maybe a little like this puppy too. They are all supposed to be the same kind of dog, so maybe they’re different puppies from the same litter.

For the Wild Thing prompt, I was originally going to do an image of the characters from the book/movie, but then I decided to do something slightly different in the style of Maurice Sendak. It took a lot longer than I thought it would to complete this painting, and honestly I could have spent another week or so on it to make it look the way I wanted it to look. Since I have other projects that I need to get done, I cut a few corners to finish the painting. There are parts I really like and parts I wish I could have spent the time to do right. I think I’ll be using some of the techniques and the palette in future paintings to see what happens. So, here’s my wild (chicken) thing painting.

Wild Chicken Thing and Max

Favorite Halloween Character (Mummy) - sruble

I decided to do a favorite character that I like to draw. I love drawing simple ghosts like these from last week, but for this prompt I decided to do a mummy, which is also fun. This is a more traditional mummy than the ones I usually do, so I played with texture in the background and added the little dog.

Oh No!

Class Halloween Party (a sponge painting) - sruble

I painted this one with cut up sponges (except the vampire). I painted the vampire with brushes to set him apart from the rest of the class. I thought the texture would be fun, and it is, except that the painting was too small (8.5 x 11) or the sponges were too big to make it look the way I wanted it to. Still, it's something I might play around with again in the future, or use brushes to try to re-create the texture. 

Eddie was out sick the day Ms. MacDonald's class decided to dress up as farm animals for the class party. Everyone forgot to tell Eddie when he came back.

Ms. MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O

 The chicken costume is my favorite. 

The Colors of Fall - sruble

Here's my painting for The Colors of Fall. 

Fall Kids / Fall Colors

This is another attempt at layering. I like how it turned out, but I think I’ll do a bit more planning next time. Want to see how I got to the finished painting? I posted the process on my blog :)

Young Frankenstein - sruble

I painted Young Frankenstein with his first monster, FrankenTeddy, and his little dog Frankie. I think Young Frankenstein would have worn PJs with his lab coat over them.

Young Frankenstein and FrankenTeddy

Looks like everyone else painted the monster as a kid ... I went with the scientist.

Pumpkin Madness - sruble

Happy October - fun topics this month :) I’m in a Halloweeny kind of mood already! Here's my pumpkin madness painting. It's mostly watercolor, with a bit of acrylic and pencil too.

Kitty Ghost

School Lunch - sruble

Last week, I said I wanted to do a crayon resist for Watercolor Wednesdays this week, so I did. I’ve always loved crayon resist, because you never quite know how it’s going to turn out. I even learned a few things (or re-learned them, since I’m sure I knew them when I was 5), like: white crayons first, then black, otherwise the black will smear (duh).

So here it is, Sheila and her best friend Amanda talking about school lunch at Zombie High:

 

Brains for lunch!

sruble: First Day of School and New Principal

These two paintings for Watercolor Wednesdays  and the CBIG blog are from a YA zombie graphic novel I’m working on, starring Sheila the Zombie Cheerleader. The graphic novel isn’t in watercolor, but I thought I’d do some zombie watercolors this month because Watercolor Wednesdays has school prompts every week.

Sheila’s first day back at school was yesterday. (She wouldn’t let me post her first day picture last week. If I did, she said she’d, “eat my brains!”) Sheila’s best friend Amanda suffered through the first day with her. Here’s their first day picture, which Sheila said I could post today:

Sheila the Zombie Cheerleader's first day of school

Sheila and Amanda are talking about the new teacher in the next picture:

Zombie High staff changes ...

The black line for both images is acrylic paint and the color is watercolor crayon. I love watercolor crayons because they make me feel like a kid again. I get to color with crayons, then paint. Fun!

Maybe next week I’ll do crayon resist … or maybe not. Halloween is coming, and ghosts are a whole lot of fun for crayon resist. 

sruble: Kitties at the Beach

This week I used a technique that I’ve never tried before, glazing. For those who don’t know, glazing is where you build up thin layers of color instead of just laying down one color from the beginning (which is what I usually do). It was fun, but frustrating to wait for layers to dry, and of course I cheated a few times and painted before a layer was completely dry (I couldn’t help myself).

Here it is; the original is a bit brighter. What do you think?

 

Remus and Romulus at the beach

 

Next time I try glazing, I’m going to try mixing more colors through layering.