“I’ve been known to “flip” my drawings and paintings and continue working on them upside down. I find that working on a drawing or painting upside down helps me see the piece from a new perspective and allows me to refine the piece until I feel like it’s complete,” said artist Stacy Schilling.

“I learned how to draw upside down from my seventh grade art teacher, Mrs. Schwartz. Learning to draw upside down helped train the right side of my brain and I feel like a better artist when I work upside down.”

Stacy began her art career as a young girl with coloring books, arts and crafts, latch hook, needlepoint and cross-stitch. Her development as an artist continued as she wrote and designed her own book and magazine, took drawing classes, advanced as a painter by learning to look at color and shape instead of the entire object, immersed herself in photography and mastered the printmaking process.

Stacy is a multi-talented artist, by day she is a graphic and web designer with her own design studio, Schilling Design, helping her clients find the identity for their company marketing materials. In the evenings and on weekends, Stacy spends her free time drawing and painting as a way to feed her creative soul and be as creative as she wants without anyone’s influence.

“There are times when I just need to create something just for me. When you operate your own design studio, your Clients become the Art Director over the project because that’s your boss and the project is ultimately for them. However, when I decide to work on a drawing or painting, I’m the boss. I choose the subject matter, the materials, how the composition will look and I am the one who decides when the piece is finished,” said Stacy.

Stacy’s passion for art emanates from every piece she creates, whether it’s a drawing, painting, logo identity, brochure or Web site.

As a designer, Stacy is drawn to very graphic compositions and her art fuses a composition similar to a graphic design piece into her drawings and paintings. Subject matter is either a still life, a picture of an image or comes from her imagination. Stacy can visualize what the finished piece will look like before it’s created and that’s how she decides whether the piece becomes a drawing or painting.

Although most of her work is predominately paintings, Stacy still continues to spend time creating large scale drawings and she works mostly in charcoal, her favorite medium of choice.

“A friend once told me ‘Just put the paint on, you can always go back and add layers if you need to.’ And that’s what I do when I create a painting. I just keep painting and painting while I go through a love-hate-love relationship with the piece until I decide that I’m in love with it and then it’s finished. With drawings, it’s completely different. Since I’m working on paper, I can’t layer the charcoal like I can with oil paint. I have to keep stepping back from the piece to see if it’s being created as I envision it to be. With a drawing, I can also ‘flip’ it upside down to see it from a new perspective and what I need to work on to finish the piece. Sometimes while my drawing is turned upside down, I’ll work on it until I feel like it’s ready to be turned right side up.”

Stacy respects work done by artists Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, Edgar Degas and Henri Matisse, and her artistic style resembles the likeness of Matisse.

As Stacy continues to pursue her career as an artist, she has no plans to abandon her design studio, Schilling Design. In fact, she has managed to find a balance between the two fields and finds that having a career as an artist and designer simultaneously works to her advantage.

“I feel like I have the best of both worlds: The Art and The Design world. Before I start I design job, I always use a sketchbook and prisma colored pencils to create several comps of what the finished piece will look like before I even use the computer. Sketching is another form of drawing for me and I find that it helps me really define a client’s final project. Because I am a designer and I’m so drawn to graphic compositions, I use that to my advantage when I work on a drawing or painting. I’m not interested in creating the entire scene, I just want to capture a small portion of the scene and really focus on that one particular area. For me, it’s about creating a piece that makes people wonder, ‘Where is the rest of the image’? I want to keep people guessing,” said Stacy.

Stacy earned a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design from Northern Kentucky University and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Kentucky.

You can find Stacy online at www.stacyschilling.com or you can contact her at (310) 913-0152 or stacy@stacyschilling.com