Meet Casey Shaffer

Today we’d like to introduce you to Casey Shaffer.

Casey, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I’m told I started doodling as early as two years old – little misshapen balloon things on the back of my mom’s grocery store receipts. For years my go-to tools were crayons, colored pencils, rollerball pens, and sparkly gel pens. I’ve always enjoyed colorful, whimsical things, and as a creatively-inclined kid in the 90s, I had access to more gel pens than you’d probably ever have a use for.

At some point in junior high school, I started to seriously consider a career in art. So I took every art class I could in school and continued drawing characters and stories my friends and I would come up with. Eventually my interests sort of honed in on animation after seeing the few 2D animated movies that DreamWorks made. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron particularly affected me since it was the first horse movie I’d seen from the horse’s POV instead of the human’s (plus, it came out during my big “Horse Phase”). It was all I could think about doing.

After graduating high school, I attended to The Art Institute of Phoenix, where I graduated in 2012 with a BA in Media Arts & Animation. It was during my time in college where I realized that maybe, animation just wasn’t for me. As I found out, I’m a rather impatient person, and I have to enjoy the entire process of making art for my brain to really gain satisfaction from it – and I didn’t enjoy repetitive drawing for hours on end. Nor did I enjoy fighting with 3D programs later on in my program. However, after taking a Digital Illustration course from RC Torres around that time, I thought maybe illustration could be my new “thing”. It’s still one of the most formative classes I’ve ever had, and I’m so thankful to RC.

Fast forward a few years of ups and downs on both the job and personal fronts. I had a sort of epiphany late 2017 and began to separate my art from my personal identity. The two had been closely intertwined all my life and it was actually negatively affecting my mental health. I struggled with the notion that there’s no shame in having a day job that isn’t your dream job. I know a lot of creative folks struggle with a 9 to 5 so it’s definitely not for everyone, but personally, it gives me financial security which greatly reduces mental stress, and at times, it gives me the means to travel (something else I really enjoy!). Having a day job that is the complete opposite of creative (right now it’s data entry) means I go actually go home full of energy and ready to work on my own stuff. I have the most fun with my art when I’m given freedom to experiment with style and technique, so I’m extremely picky with freelance projects I take on. I’m also starting to get back into fantasy writing, something I sort of abandoned in college. I never want to stop improving with my art, and my career goals may completely change in a year or 5, but I feel more okay with myself, and I think that’s a valid place to be.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
As I kind of alluded to earlier, I had a lot of trouble finding a job in my field right after college. There just isn’t a lot of animation work in Arizona, not the kind that I wanted to do at the time, and I couldn’t afford to move to California. Still can’t, in fact! I relied on freelance work from IRL and online clients, and sometimes I enjoyed the work, but most of the time it was stifling. It caused me to have a lot of doubts about my future in that year after graduating. I decided that I’d just try to get a job that was similar to what I wanted to do and learn what I could from it. I’ve been a fill-in courtroom sketch artist, worked at a movie theater, drawn cars for educational road safety videos, worked with customers to perfect their stationery for all kind of occasions, and dipped my toes into the pharmacy tech field.

I’m still not sure I’ve arrived at my final destination or whatever you want to call it, which is difficult when many of my peers are settled into their lives, but I don’t think I’m the kind of person to stick with the same thing for very long anyway. In my current stage of life, having a day job to pay the bills while I do art for fun on the side is what suits me best. I don’t view it as giving up on art at all; sometimes your dreams just change.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
Most of my freelance work has been graphite or colored pencil portraiture, typically dogs, but I’ve done a couple of other animals as well as some family portraits.

The other hat I wear is an illustrator/character designer. I design small physical merchandise such as stickers, keychains or bookmarks for local comic/anime conventions that I exhibit at a couple of times a year. I share a table with some artist pals and we are constantly exchanging ideas. And I’ve also got a few different stories bouncing around in my head that have evolved over the years, and I’m constantly updating the character designs as I do more research.

I sometimes worry about not having a super eye-catching style or brand, but I like to think my ability to imitate a variety of styles is actually boon. If there’s anything consistent in my work, I think it’s my preference in capturing a feeling or emotion accurately, often eschewing photorealism. For this reason, I generally like a lot of texture and lose line quality/brushstrokes versus smooth, technical precision and perfection. I’m also super into flowers and flower language.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Success is so rigidly defined in the US, with such a strict timeline for when we all should accomplish things within our lifetimes. I have to stop myself constantly from comparing myself to others because truthfully, we’re all on different paths and we’re going to end up in different places at different times, and there’s nothing wrong with that. For me, I suppose success would be creating something that touched people’s lives in a good way and stuck with them, maybe even inspired them somehow.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.caseyshaffer.net
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/thecapturedspy
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/casey_shaffer

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