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Stephanie Ruble (a.k.a. sruble) has been drawing and painting ever since she could hold a crayon and she' been making up stories since she learned to talk. These days she writes middle grade novels and continues to paint and draw. What really happened:
Kitty also liked to talk to my family and said things that I wouldn't say (or wasn't allowed to say). She said what she was thinking, without thinking about the consequences (and since she was a stuffed cat, there weren't any consequences for her - there were sometimes for me though).
Other influences on my creativity:
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* When I was young, I had a stuffed animal named Kitty. I made up lots of stories and adventures for Kitty and treated her like she was a person, even though she was a stuffed cat. That's her in the drawing, which I did in first or second grade (according to Mom's note on the back). Kitty's hollow tree is where she went to have her adventures. Unfortunately, I don't remember the details of the world inside her hollow tree.
I now have a character named 
* Halloween is my favorite holiday, which probably isn't a surprise, given that I like to write about zombies and other things that go bump in the night. Through the years, I've also enjoyed creating Halloween art, like the painting shown here, which I made when I was around nine years old. The technique is called crayon resist. What that means is that you draw on the paper with crayon first, and then paint over it with watercolor. The wax resists the paint so the picture shows through. I still think this is a really neat technique and use it every once in a while, just for fun, although I'm trying to find a way to use it for an art project or for 
Sometimes I like to take creatures that you'd usually see on Halloween (ghosts, vampires, zombies, werewolves, etc.) and put them in non-Halloween scenes. For instance, my zombies go to school and live their lives all year round. Here's an image I drew in October of 2009, when I imagined what ghosts like to do during the summer. I thought that ghosts might like frozen treats when they aren't playing tricks, and they had to get their treats than from the Mr. Ghostie cloud mobile. What song do you think the Mr. Ghostie mobile plays? 
* I grew up in Minnesota and I don't like snow or winter, but I do like drawing winter scenes and snowmen. In first grade I wrote a poem about how much I hated winter and ended by calling it a pig (one of the biggest insults Kitty and I could think of in first grade, except Kitty said, "peeg" instead of pig so she wouldn't get in trouble for saying it). Here's one of my more recent winter images. This picture of a girl and her brother making snow angels is one of two images I created to illustrate my story, Brother Trouble, which was in Wee Ones magazine in January of 2006. 
* By this point, you might be wondering what's with all the farm animals. There was a segment on