If you looked around the Rutledge house for more than 30 seconds, you would know how much Jalyn Rutledge likes to draw.

The walls of the family's home in Coos Bay are covered with white sheets covered in bright colors and imaginative shapes. The drawings trail from the kitchen, through the hallway and into Jalyn's bedroom.

The 7-year-old second-grader at Madison Elementary was excited when she found out one of her drawings had been selected by Highlights for Children magazine for publication in the April issue. Jalyn's drawing, “We go out to sea,” was picked from the more than 35,000 submissions that are sent in each year by children all over the world.

“I just got bored,” Jalyn said quietly, with a shy smile, of her famous drawing. “I drew it and Mom said I could send it in.”

A pretty girl with sparkling eyes, Jalyn is obviously bright and very talented. Her pretty drawing is a delight in brilliant colors and creativity, with several fish of different sizes jumping over a boat - although Jalyn said she has never seen fish jump that high before in person.

The daughter of Michael and Toni Rutledge, Jalyn also is a singer and won a second-place award in a talent show last year.

“If she's not drawing, she's singing,” Toni said with a laugh. “She made up her own song and sang it in the contest. She's constantly singing, singing, singing.”

Jalyn also enjoys riding her scooter, listening to music and playing with her Barbie dolls and with her friends.

The Rutledge family has been in the Coos Bay area since 2002, when Michael, a member of the U.S. Coast Guard, was transferred to the area from Miami. Now Toni is packing up the house to go back to Florida, where the family will be transferred in July. Jalyn said she would miss her friends at Madison Elementary a lot when she moved.

Jalyn has been reading Highlights magazine for several years, and said her favorite parts were the “pictures and the Timbertoes,” a comic strip.

Highlights, which will celebrate its 60th anniversary in June and print the one-billionth issue of the magazine, is mailed to more than 2 million subscribers a month and read by millions of children worldwide. The editors at Highlights receive thousands of drawings, poems, stories, jokes, riddles, recipes, book recommendations and letters every year. According to Christine French Clark, editor of Highlights magazine, although the submissions are welcome and the staff takes the time to review them all, the magazine can only publish 2 percent of the submissions it receives.

“We respond to everything, and we look at everything kids send us,” Clark said. “Kids get a reply. And when we tell them that we liked their drawing, someone did look at it and did enjoy it.”

In a single month, the magazine receives about 1,200 drawings, and since the staff cannot include all the artwork it receives, they try to include work by boys and girls of all ages and from different places in the world, Clark said.

“Those pages are some of the favorite pages of kids. We know those are the first pages a lot of readers turn to,” she added. “We think it inspires our readers to see the work of their peers. It's really a neat thing.”

Jalyn thought it was cool her drawing was chosen, but she didn't brag about it much. She said not even her teacher or classmates at Madison knew about her selection in the magazine.

Even though she's been published to a worldwide audience, Jalyn isn't ready to retire yet. She's still drawing, steadily filling her family's walls with brightly colored sheets of paper. But even artists have higher ambitions than fame: Jalyn also plans to become a professional snow-boarder.