A Brief Introduction…
Hi, I’m Shelby Shaper.
I’m 24, an INFJ, a Cancer, a corporate America employee and most importantly, an artist.
I grew up in Oak Lawn, IL, a small suburb just outside Chicago. My older brother, Austin, and I were homeschooled by our mom, Renee. Since we were little, we always had a natural aversion to cookie cutter lifestyles and boring jobs. I attended high school at Mother McAuley, an all girls catholic high school in Chicago, and went on to receive two degrees from Columbia College Chicago: A bachelor’s degree in Traditional Animation and a master’s degree in Entrepreneurship for Creative Businesses.
In the summer of 2022, I was living with my parents in Archer Heights. On a random morning at the end of August, my home life took a bit of a turn when my dad decided to admit (after being caught) he had been reading my private emails for over three months. My mom and I had had issues with him for years prior but this was the straw that broke the camels back. This event led to me and my mom moving in with my grandmother back in Oak Lawn. After a week or so of processing the situation, I decided that I wanted to get out of Oak Lawn and try my hand at living on my own.
Now, if I was going to live by myself in Chicago, I was going to need a job. After a lucky break with a headhunting agency, I interviewed for a temporary position at a consulting firm in the city. Less than 2 weeks later, I was moving out to the North Side of Chicago with my dog, my sparse personal belongings and a job offer.
2 months into the temp role, I was offered a permanent job with the company. And 1.5 years in the permanent job, I’ve moved out of the city and back to Oak Lawn.
Sounds like a step backwards, but it was actually a huge step forward. Early in 2024, I realized that the combination of rent, living expenses and general personal upkeep was accounting for way too much of my paycheck. I was spending as much as I was earning and for someone whose goal it was to save up enough money for a down payment on a house, that wasn’t going to fly. So I made a tough decision to pack up everything, move to the suburbs and live with a friend of the family. The convenient part of my new accommodations, other than the fact I no longer have to pay rent, is that the family friend I’m staying with lives in the same condo complex as my mom and grandmother. Having my mom be a 2 minute walk away from my condo is a huge benefit, now we get to yap all the time!
As of writing this, I’m about 3 weeks into this new living situation and I’d say I’m rather enjoying it so far. Except for a few quirks of the joint (I’m looking at you, centipede I found in the bathroom), the benefits are more than worth it. My mom is serving as an immense help to me. Offering to help with my laundry, take my dog to work with her, taking me to and from the train etc. Not having to worry about things like that leaves me with so much more time to work on my art and personal projects. I get to stay out late at the train station and at cafes typing out business ideas and blog posts, drawing away on my iPad and just being allowed to work unbothered. My mom tells me that she’s my “Patron” as she wants my only job outside of work to be creating art and working on my business. My only payment to her is being the designated driver for my grandmother on the weekends and helping around in the accordion store my mother co-owns a few Saturdays a month.
Now that I have this wealth of time and funds, I’m able to really focus in on my business. I’ve been the owner of The Shelby Shaper Shop on Etsy for over 7 years. There, I sell stickers and art prints of various pop culture characters and most recently, stickers based on popular books! (See the Stories to Stickers page!). I love the sticker biz because it’s always so fun to see how much joy a silly little sticker can bring someone. I want to continue expanding my sticker store in addition to stepping into new creative territories. These territories include but are not limited to:
Nature inspired shadow boxes
An interactive sci-fi mystery book
Specially themed oracle decks
So much more!
I would like to use this space on my website to update my progress in my art projects and personal life. There’s so much that I want to work on and I can’t wait to share it!
Always the best, Shelby :)