Margaret Meyer Schultz isn’t REALLY twisted.

It’s just that she loves Halloween, she loves darkly imaginative filmmaker Tim Burton and she loves painting curious pictures and fabricating even curiouser puppets and dolls.

So if gallery-goers at an upcoming exhibition of Schultz’s paintings and sculptures are creeped out by her assemblages of doll parts and the fantastical creatures she sees and brings out of her canvases — all the better.

“If I scare a few people, I can’t say that I mind,” she says wryly.

“I actually do have kind of that same fear. You’re afraid it’s going to come alive, but you can’t not look at it,” she says of the doll bits scattered about her studio.

Schultz, a Kansas City, Kan., artist, was studying painting at Kansas University when Tim Burton released the 1993 animated film “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” It’s an odd little tale of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown whose dream to celebrate Christmas goes morbidly awry. Schultz remembers the film fondly.

“I was completely smitten,” she says, “and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

By “that” she doesn’t mean celebrating Christmas by passing out toys that come to life and terrorize children, but rather creating the sort of motley, stop-motion animation puppets Burton used in his unlikely fairy tale. She finished school, took a few odd jobs (including a stint on the costume crew of Robert Altman’s 1996 film “Kansas City”) and then was accepted into the California Institute for the Arts, the Disney-created school where Burton honed his animation skills. It was a “nightmare” come true.

But she didn’t go.

Tedious but great

Instead, she headed to Prague with her fiance, where serendipity intervened. On a bridge in the Czechoslovakian capital, the couple met a man selling marionettes and scored a job painting the hands, feet and faces of the stringed wooden dolls.

Recently, Schultz spearheaded the puppet fabrication for a revival of the 1950s and ’60s animated classic “Davey and Goliath.” She spent a tedious eight months at Premavision (creators of “Gumby”) in Los Osos, Calif., sculpting, casting, painting, dressing and, most intensively, maintaining stop-motion puppets that animators put through a grueling sequence of poses.

(It takes 24 frames per second to make a stop-motion movie; “Davey and Goliath’s Snowboard Christmas” is an hour-long special. You do the math).

“It was just one of the greatest experiences of my whole life,” Schultz says. “I was challenged every day, and I got to be creative every day.”

When she’s not pursuing her first love, Schultz makes paintings and assembles sculptures. Her characters, whether personified on canvas or in the third dimension, spring from an eccentric imagination. They’re outsiders — sometimes happily, sometimes sadly so.

In “Alice,” a stripy legged ballerina stands forlornly by as a snail is led away on a lanky leash. But in “The Fact of Their Leaving,” a four-armed “little guy on wheels” with antennae, rolling along next to a biped feline, grins from, uh, ear to ear?

Something insidious

Schultz employs texture and a muted color palette to imbue the paintings with the appearance of age and shadow. The scenarios double as both cartoons and cunning stories.

“I think any child could kind of look at (my pieces) and see they’re sort of like illustrations from an unwritten children’s book — but a children’s book that’s also geared toward adults because there’s also kind of a dark side to my pieces,” she says.

“Kids may pick up on that. It’s nothing too scary or too spooky for them. But I think it also appeals to adults because there is usually something possibly more insidious going on.”

Schultz doesn’t have any particular bizarre beings in mind when she gets in front of the easel. She starts by building up her canvases with Gesso and then applying watery black paint that runs through the texture. Then, like a kid watching cloud shapes in the sky, she begins to see images forming before her eyes, and she uses paint to bring them out.

“I never have any idea how the painting is going to end up,” she says.

“And I’m not going through some deep psychological exploration (at least, not consciously). I just create things that make me happy because they aren’t anything you’d see in real life.”