For much of artist Mike Schley’s career, he’s been telling other people’s stories.

Since 2001 he’s worked with fantasy and science fiction publications, bringing to life the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy games.

“I get paid to build worlds that people love to explore and lose themselves in. They can let their imaginations run wild and that’s incredibly fulfilling,” he said. “As far as a day job goes, I wouldn’t knock it.”

Schley’s work has been published in more than 250 books and projects, and he’s developed his own RPG Adventure Series: Schleyscapes.

“It’s essentially a packaged environment that kids or adults can import directly into their games,” he said. “They have really cool visuals, so people can have lots of great content to work with in their home on a Sunday night when all of their friends come over.”

All of Schley’s commercial success meant his personal work was often put on the backburner. He considers himself to be a bit of a workaholic.

His decision to enroll at PAFA meant his art could take center stage in his life.

“There was a dry period of personal creativity for about a decade and I didn’t really give myself the opportunity or time to get in the studio to work on paintings,” Schley said. “That’s the reason I wanted to come back to school, I felt like if I was really going to do it, I needed to do it in a big way.”

Schley and his wife, artist Jillian Schley, originally moved from Arizona to Philadelphia so Jillian could enroll in PAFA’s MFA program.

“Jill and I were really interested in Philadelphia as a home base to put roots down,” he said. “Here you can still have studio space and be part of an active art scene that’s really growing.”

Jillian graduated with her MFA in 2015 and soon after Schley enrolled at PAFA. He began in the certificate program and is now completing his MFA.

“The thing that really impressed me about the school was Clint Jukkala, he was the head of the MFA program at the time,” he said. “What really struck me about PAFA was its mix of traditional skills-based, French atelier-style training on the undergrad side and the much more rigorous training on the MFA side, all in the same building.”

While studying at PAFA, Schley is still working with a few clients and publications; he says most of his commercial work is in the digital space. At PAFA, his art is much bigger than a computer screen and involves traditional skills.

Schley exhibited “Measure: a meditation on space and time” in the Broad Street Studio and in the Richard C. von Hess Foundation Works on Paper Gallery, Historic Landmark Building as part of Material World.

The loops of paper were hand printed in PAFA’s print shop. On the surface, Measure and other works Schley is making at PAFA look very different from his digital work but there is a thread going through everything.

“Even though it’s a sculptural inspiration, is in a lot of ways sort of playing in an environment that’s similar to me building a map, building a world. But in a much more non-linear sort of environmental way,” Schley said. “I think about space a lot and how the individual relates to their environment, how we define ourselves and relationships to the people around us and as well as the spaces around us.”

The scale of Measure is indicative of the work Schley is creating in the MFA program.

“I don’t want to be a guy that just paints paintings for somebody to buy,” Schley said. “For me, I’d much rather make gigantic awe-inspiring work that no one can really afford to buy but everyone wants to come see.”

He is already planning his thesis project, a 15 by 25-foot tall painting.

“It’s been really liberating being able to work at such a large scale and to be able to take the kind of risks with my work that really sort of compel me to push forward and test my boundaries.”