Small Dog Dreams 

Shelley Low, Singapore, Singapore fawndogart.co

I’ve been meaning to do loopdeloop for years now and this April’s theme just happened to mesh with my grief over recently losing my dog. I wish we had managed to take her to see the wildflowers in the sun.

I was on a plane this weekend, and I was chatting with the woman sitting next to me about an upcoming writer’s strike. “Do you really think you’re mistreated?” she asked me.

That’s not the issue at stake here. Let me tell you a little something about “minirooms.”

Minirooms are a way of television writing that is becoming more common. Basically, the studio will hire a small group of writers, 3-6 or so, and employ them for just a few weeks. In those few weeks (six weeks seem to be common), they have to hurriedly figure out as much about the show as they can – characters, plots, outlines for episodes. Then at the end of the six weeks, all the writers are fired except for the showrunner, who has to write the entire series themselves based on the outlines.

This is not a widespread practice, but it has become more common over the past couple of years. Studios like it because instead of paying for a full room for the full length of the show, they just pay a handful of writers for a fraction of the show. It’s not a huge problem now, but the WGA only gets the chance to make rules every three years – if we let this go for another three years and it becomes the norm? That would be DEVASTATING for the tv writing profession.

Do I feel like I’m mistreated? No. I LOVE my job! But in a world of minirooms, there is no place for someone like me – a mid-level writer who makes a decent living working on someone else’s show (I’d like to be a showrunner someday, but for now I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and my husband and I are trying to start a family so I like not being support rather than the leader for now). In a miniroom, there are only two levels – the handful of glorified idea people who are already scrambling to find their next show because you can’t make a decent living off of one six-week job (and since there are fewer people per room, there are fewer jobs overall, even at the six-week amount), and the overworked, stressed as fuck showrunner who is going to have to write the entire thing themselves. Besides being bad for me making a living, I also just think it’s plain bad for television as an art form – what I like about TV is how adaptable it is, how a whole group of people come together to tell a story better than what any of them could do on their own. Plus the showrunner can’t do their best work under all of that pressure, episode after episode, back to back. Minirooms just…fucking suck.

The WGA is proposing two things to fix this – a rule that writers have to be employed for the entire show, and a rule tying the number of writers in the room to the number of episodes you have per season. I don’t think it’s unreasonable. It’s the way shows have run since the advent of television. It’s only in the last couple of years that this has become a new thing. It’s exploitative. It squeezes out everyone except showrunners and people who have the financial means to work only a few months a year. It makes television worse. And that is the issue in this strike that means everything to me, and that is why I voted yes on the strike authorization vote.

I explained this to a young writer recently. They could not understand why the WGA might go on strike, and worried that it would hurt younger writers.

They had worked in TV for 4 years, been on 3 major TV shows, primarily in “mini rooms”, had their name listed as cowriter on one broadcast episode and had never been on set for any of their shows. Had never seen anything they wrote being filmed. They knew next to nothing about the actual process of getting TV made.

I explained that we weren’t going on strike for people like me, we were going on strike for people like them. Because we need more writers to be there, to work their way up. We need a generation of showrunners to take over from us, and to, I hope, have an easier time of it. We need the young writers to be properly paid, not to be on a six week writers room once a year, and a crack at having their names on a script.

some progress shots from the Rusted Moss release trailer - it was a lot of fun getting to define my own hybrid puppeted-handdrawn workflow, and making it work with the style that the devs and publisher wanted. done in my faithful old copy of Toonboom Animate 3!

worked on these animated sections for the Rusted Moss release trailer! my friends created such a rich and visually fun world to play around with in their game, it was a delight to help them realise their vision. it’s out now on PC and I hope you’ll check it out if you like bullet hells, action-packed metroidvanias, or eldritch faery magic in the post-apocalypse.

Storyboards, animation: me ( @shelzie )​ Background art: @dewmanna​ Composite: @mtbobo​

nearly a couple of weeks ago we abruptly and unexpectedly lost Yufi to complications following a sudden illness, and i’m still very much a wreck. the way she entered our lives and how well her character suited us always felt like destiny, and her sudden loss feels surreal and wrong. we can honestly say that we cherished every moment we had with her. we had nearly seven happy years with her and had expected at least a few more. she was a big-on-the-inside little dog with a lot of opinions and even more heart, and her absence is deeply, deeply felt. my little thundercloud with a sunbeam heart. we miss you so much. hopefully i’ll get back to drawing more again soon, it sucks to completely have the wind knocked out of me by this just as i was starting to do more personal stuff and having fun again. talking about her helps, maybe i can blog a bit. it’s been a rough month.

it's come to my attention that a lot of people don't know about bluemaxima's flashpoint and genuinely think they'll never be able to play their favorite 00s internet games ever again so i just want to remind everyone that flashpoint is a huge internet flash game preservation project that allows you to play just about any internet flash game/animation despite the death of flash. if they've got it in their database (and they probably do) you can play it. go forth and drink in the 00s nostalgia

even if you think there's no way they'll have the game u want. they probably do anyway. when i first downloaded flashpoint i thought for sure theres no way they will have the obscure flash game i played for hours as a kid that was only even available on the internet for like 2 months in 2006. but you know what. they had it. seriously, download flashpoint

art tips

Gonna add on to this, if that's ok, because I think a lot of people don't know how to categorize their work:

You don't have to be a professional (ie get paid) to be any of these things. You can claim the title without making any claims to the quality of your work. It's ok.

imagine if aliens found the dead body of a human being exploded in the vacuum of space and they started making fun of the mutilated corpse calling it “splatter alien” and saying it was the ugliest alien in the whole galexy. and then made stuffed animals of it to sell to their alien kids. that’s what happened on this planet to the blob fish

fight the slander. post pressurized blobfish

my Wanderhome character, Melati the mousedeer moth-tender! i could make characters for this game for the rest of my life, i think

pretty recent Aloe featuring her outfit upgrades!

unceremoniously  kicking off this new sketchblog with some extremely old friends. been revisiting a lot of old characters lately and it feels nice to play with them again + an updated skill set!

^ hello it’s me! felt like doing a revamp and I think I’ll be posting art over on @pearly-scales at least for a while, though I’ll try to reblog some stuff over here too.

anyways, props to you if you recognise these doges! I hadn’t drawn them since 2009 and I’ve never drawn those babies as adults before. still very close to my heart.

100% sales from this Riso print will be donated to Molham Team for the next week to raise funds for their efforts helping displaced families who’ve been affected by the earthquake in Syria and Turkey.

When things like this happen I feel helpless and can’t do very much on my own, but when I do fundraisers with my prints I can usually send a couple thousand- or at least several hundred dollars!! This picnic print is one of my most popular prints- I hope this helps anyone who’d like to make a donation but would also like a print as a thank you! I am still charging shipping but the full print price will go directly to @molhamteam!

And of course, if you can, please donate directly to @molhamteam! They were recommended in a tweet full of other volunteer groups working immediately with those affected, and after some research I think this group is the best to send a donation to that will make a real and immediate difference.

Thank you! ❤️🌸🍓❤️ https://www.instagram.com/p/CoX8XrMSNMT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

draft centaur ladies!

Is it possible to buy prints of any of these? Like I know it says draft but I’m so love at the farmer/gatherer. What a mood

aw, thanks for asking! I don’t have a print shop at the moment, though I’d like to set one up at some point, but you’re welcome to print these yourself for your own use if you want!

the apple lady is now an OC of mine so I guess she made an impression on me too! <3

little late posting this here whoops but a Tuca & Bertie drawing to celebrate the new season dropping on adult swim! I storyboarded a bit in the episode that airs tomorrow (“Kyle”) :B

Oh, wow, amazing!

(I don’t know the timing of this post but I suspect “Kyle” may be the one I missed… I was working extraordinarily late on Sunday the 27th.)

That’s the one! I’ve been hearing all the eps are viewable in the Adult Swim app if you can download it, but I haven’t checked that.