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The ancient origins of this word are lost in time (but could have something to do with lip/likh/rikh to furrow, draw a line, write, paint or with shilA, rock or paint, which may itself have something to do with shi/sho to grant) but for more than two and half thousand years, the word shilpa (with -a as in English about) has a relation to variety and decoration. It is the common word for a work of craft: handicraft, mechanical, or fine art. The meaning is expansive and includes, technically, the 64 `exterior' (or practical) arts like wood-work (carpenter), stone-work (architecture), jewellery, acting, dancing, music, medicine, etc. and the 64 `interior' (or secret) arts like kissing, embracing, and others by which the then society prepared its preteen kids for adult life using books like the kAmasUtra. It also expressed skill, ceremony, ingenuity, contrivance, etc., and the meaning expanded to shape, form, artificial (a semantic shift happened in English as well: from artistic to its current meaning). This has been used as a masculine name already in the late Vedic period.

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The change of the -a to an -A (as in English car) to make it a feminine name is not Sanskrit (this feminine in Sanskrit merely meant a barber's shop; there was a feminine in -I, as in sheep, which did mean a female artist/mechanic, coincidentally the nominative of the masculine artist is also the same form shilpI). shilpA des appear in modern India, but immediately evokes shilpa: I do not know the languages where it first arose to tell you whether people would have interpreted it then as a work of art (beautiful), or one with art (artist), but I suspect it is the former.