Want to do something fun and creative in July? Join me and artist Melody Pena of Windstone Editions for a month-long art challenge on the subject of animals! We’ve put this together because we both like drawing and sculpting animals of all sorts, and have prepared a prompt list of 31 cool and unusual critters for your creating pleasure. Any medium you like, any style you like! Check the Zooly Facebook page each day in July for the animal of the day, and post in the comments, or post on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #zoolyartchallenge.

Photo by Melody Pena of her computer-zone helpers.

Melody and I met online through a course we’re both taking called Comix Launch Pro (which will be a subject for another post sometime soon), in which we are learning an essential skill for comics artists — running a successful Kickstarter!  (more about that soon too)

We quickly hit it off in our conversations in the course comments, became Facebook friends. We started discussing art challenges when she posted a gorgeous little unicorn cartoon for Junicorn, an art challenge for the month of June. October is Inktober month, and May is Mermay month, but we couldn’t find anything specifically for July, so we decided to invent something. “Zooly” seemed to cover our mutual interests in drawing animals. We tossed around some prompt lists, and ideas of how we wanted to run it, and finally put it all together on a dedicated Zooly Facebook page.

If you’re not on Facebook, don’t worry — you can still find out about the prompts right here, and on Melody’s blog! You can also look at my Twitter or Instagram feeds, or the hashtag #zooly on either of those platforms. I’ll be posting the prompts daily in all those places, so take your pick.

Art challenges are a great way to stretch your artistic and imaginative muscles (as I have mentioned many times!), and have a nice stockpile of art and ideas at the end of it to boot. We’ll each be posting on our own blogs and the Zooly Facebook page about the benefits of art challenges, ideas for fitting art into your life, and what to do with all that art.

• Zooly is coming!
• What’s that?
• We’re glad you asked!
• Zooly is a month-long art challenge during the month of July, dreamed up by Karen Gillmore and Melody Pena, two artists who both like drawing and sculpting animals.
• Every day for the month of July, there will be a prompt for an animal to spark your creative juices.
• You can work in any style or medium; a simple cartoon or a stick figure, or… a sock puppet, or… an arrangement of pepperoni on a pizza that looks like a orangutan!
• The prompts are animals we’ve chosen that we thought would make interesting subjects, and perhaps a bit on the unusual side. We’ll be creating right along with you.
• What do you do with all this amazing artwork? Post it! We’ll be using the hashtag #zoolyartchallenge on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and there is a special Facebook page dedicated to Zooly where you can post your work in the comments of the prompt post of the day.
• How do people get the prompts? Check each day on the three social media platforms, or our blogs. I’ll be posting the animal of the day here at 12:01 AM (that’s right after midnight) PDT, which will mean you folks over in the UK can start your day with it (you’re 8 hours ahead of us here).