3D Modeler, Illustrator,
Character Designer,
Adjunct Professor
As a versatile artist and accomplished draughtsman, Stacey loves creating expertly finished artwork possessing a dynamic quality and believability. Her passion for small details and accuracy is apparent from her sketchbook drawings of anatomy and architecture, to her traditional and digital painting, as well as her 3D modeling. From highly rendered traditional media to digital dreamlands, Stacey's work celebrates the poetic interplay of texture and form, color and light, reality and story-telling.
Stacey also has the great honor of being an Adjunct Instructor at Pratt Institute, New York City College of Technology (CUNY), Montclair State University, The College of New Jersey, New Jersey City University, & Brookdale Community College. She teaches a broad range of courses including Senior Project Development, Senior Projects I & II (Capstone), 3D Modeling I (for Animation & Games) & 3D Modeling II (for Animation), Lighting & Rendering, Game Character Design, Drawing I & II, 3D Animation I, 3D Animation Studio III, Modeling in Maya & ZBrush, Digital and Traditional Illustration, Intro to Digital Media, Digital Color & Light, and 3D Motion Graphics in Blender for Communication Design.
Warrior Queen Series (part 2), new character designs - Sculptures in Progress
Current Practice and Methodology:
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There is a French term for unconventional beauty or what can be described in English as "pretty ugly". For woman, it's jolie-laide and for men, it's beau-laid. My artistic pursuits and my research both center around this basic concept. My work explores the notion of beauty in ugliness. Can harmony be found in the aesthetically discordant? In my digital sculpture, I enjoy the twisting of reality into something that is unreal and yet could almost be "real." I believe that the sublime can be found in the grotesque, a kind of poetry that can be seen in the unexpected curves and contours of a creature newly created. For me, monsters aren't really monsters at all. They're just the creatures that don't belong. Even in my sleep, I push and pull digital clay around until creatures are formed out of gray nothingness. When time allows, and I'm left to my own devices, I sculpt them into existence as if they were always meant to be.
My approach to digital media is rather traditional in nature. I like to be responsible for every mark, every protrusion, and every indentation. I shy away from letting the technology do very much of the work on my behalf. Perhaps this is because I began as an illustrator working mostly in pen and ink. I scratched away on a 2D surface until the illusion of 3D emerged through the magic of furious action and strategically planned mark-making. When I was introduced to 3D modeling, the world became a more expansive, more otherworldly place. I learned to fuse my love of tiny details with the creative freedom and spontaneity afforded to me by digital sculpting. I start each piece as a basic sphere in ZBrush so that I can control every aspect of the creature’s origin, growth, and subsequent development to a fully realized being. Each character I create begins its existence as a simple ball of digital clay. Using programs such as ZBrush and Maya, I bring characters to life employing methodically sculpted texture and believable, yet fantastical, anatomical form. Essentially, I make real monsters out of imaginary clay.
My current pieces depict the characters who inhabit an alien universe shared by several distinct societies. Included among my alien species is My Warrior Queen Series. I created the base mesh for this particular sub-series as a human female, conforming to current beauty standards such as fuller lips, large breasts, a tiny waist, and ample hips. I then distorted the figures to metamorphose my human models into alien creatures in an effort to test the boundaries of what is considered desirable. Essentially, are they still pretty?
