I picked up another small graphic design job today! I met with my buddy, Adam, (socially distant, outdoors and with masks on) to discuss redesigning his bands logo. We talked about what he and his bandmates have been through over the years and their plans to release their first LP. I also talked about how I've been considering doing more graphic design work for clients now that Covid has taken away my DJ & vending gigs. His band logo, and the other design I've been working on, are good first jobs to help me get my feet wet doing freelance work, which has never been appealing to me before.

I hardly did anything productive today. I've been so frustrated lately building my new website on Wordpress and making little progress so I took some time away from the computer today. I have new items that I'll be adding to my store and the plan was to have them available when I rebuilt the new site but since that's taking me so long I'll probably have them available on my current (Weebly) site soon. I haven't been getting much exercise lately so tonight I forced myself to go out for some walking & running in the neighborhood. By the time I made it out it was already 11:22 PM but it's cool since I've been in vampire mode for a few weeks now, staying up till 4 or 5 AM and waking up around noon. Livin' la CoVida Loca

But I made a little bit of progress on the store.​ FYI: the website I'm working on is not FRANKIEMCFLY.COM. It's a dummy site that I'm learning to use before moving my domain name over.

I didn't get too artsy fartsy today but I did take a little time to think about how I want to build out the website. I currently have all my t-shirts and stickers on one page in my store and that's it. I plan on doing the same with the new one but I also want to create individual pages for each style of t-shirt that has more details and information about each design. I wish creating websites were as easy as sketching them.

I've been working on a design for a client for a couple weeks and it's almost done. I won't share till it's done-done but here's a little portion of it.

Wordpress is confusing as fuck but I made a little bit of progress. Tonight I played around with Themes, created some pages and played around with menu. There's still so much more to do before I can make it live.

I tried using a Weebly to Wordpress exporter to move my blog but got the error message below. The Wordpress dashboard shows that my old blog posts came over but the images did not.

Here are a few more sketches I made today for the client project I've been working on. We figured out which path to go down so now I'm trying to expand on the original idea and to come up with my first round of variations. 

My new monitor arrived today! Finally, I have more room to play with when using Adobe apps. I can even rotate it 90 degrees and fit my whole homepage on it. Weebly also sent me an eviction notice today. My website is still up and running as of now. I paid for a year of web hosting with a new host and installed Wordpress. Hopefully I can transfer my old blog posts over before Weebly shuts it down. Otherwise I'm gonna have to pay for an extra month just to copy it over. 

I made a lot of progress yesterday & today preparing my taxes. I got all my 2019 business expenses categorized and entered into Turbotax. It's even showing me, as of right now, that I'm expected to receive a federal refund. It's been a few years since I've gotten money back from the Uncle Sam and that got me excited.

and I also fixed a typo.

Today I started writing messages on the protesters signs and went for a hike at Alum Rock Park, up to Eagle Rock. Can you see where I fucked up on one of the signs? Also check out the pics of the mutant bug (tarantula hawk) and a plant from outer space.

Next up are the signs.

I drew some more people

I made a little bit of progress on this today after taking 4 days off. Starting from the left I straightened out a bunch of signs and began fleshing out the people.

I finished the first pass on this 11"x17" drawing today. I laid out all the people with signs and then filled the gaps with people holding up their fists. The next step, after a few tweaks, will either be putting the messages on the signs or adding details to the protesters and making them all unique. Right now they all look like bald white men. When I'm done inking this, and if I'm happy with the results, I'll get to work penciling the 18"x24" version.

As I work towards an 18"x24" size drawing of my "protesters" piece I'm doing smaller versions as art studies. What I've been doing so far has been drawing the people holding up blank signs then I'll go and write something in them after. Because I'm going to have so many different people with signs I thought I should figure out what they're gonna say so I started writing & laying them out. Almost everything I wrote is something I've read on social media and on people's actual signs relating to George Floyds murder, police brutality protests and the Black Lives Matter movement.

I didn't anything artsy today. I'm still tired from the event I DJ'd on Saturday. I just did laundry and went out to buy groceries & supplies. Tomorrow I'll try and fix all the little fuck ups I made while inking my recent drawings: Brains/Guts, Hearts & Stars, and Eyes & Mouths. I got my bottle of Pro White ready to go. I hope it matches the paper. How shitty is the name? Especially right now. I love the red P logo tho! Simple, clean & chonky

Good news! I got my Covid test results back this morning, no cooties detected. I also finished inking Eyes & Mouths today. Next I gotta erase the pencils and go over it, and my the other two pieces, Brains/Guts & Hearts & Stars, with white-out to fix mistakes. I'm finally beginning to see daylight!

I laid some ink down on my Eyes & Mouths piece today. I want to remember what's happening now with the Black Lives Matter movement so I changed one of the pupils from an egg shape (I think I drew it around Easter) to a rising black fist. There are other icons on here, like a tooth for when I got a root canal and a roll of toilet paper (pictured below) for when it was sold out at stores due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

I took the day off from protesting, watching police brutality videos and constantly checking the news. I wanted to work on Eyes & Mouths after a few days off. I looked to see what I had to ink next, lots of straight lines & almost perfect circles, then practiced on a separate card. I was super rusty and wasn't feeling good about my lines. After a while I decided not to work on the main piece but to keep drawing on the cards. The only thing I drew that I kinda liked was my Cells pattern with little pupils all looking towards the center. Simple but good practice. Tomorrow I'll try again and hopefully finish the piece.

With all the chaos that's been happening in my city, and around the US, I've just been trying to focus my energy on finishing this piece. That's not to say that I haven't put thought into current events. (George Floyd's murder protests) What I'm reading and seeing online has been weighing down on me, stirring up all sorts of feelings and I've been processing that while working on this drawing these past couple days.

Friday started off great. I met up with my buddy, Jon, at Lake Cunningham and we went on a (socially-distant) walk around the park. After one lap Jon split and I stayed to do one more then ran into another friend, Adam, who was getting off work at the park. He drove up to show me he was rocking my San Jose shirt. That made my day! I didn't realize I was wearing my San Jose shirt till afterwards. On the way out of the park I snapped a picture of this awesome hand-drawn found-dog flyer posted near the entrance. When I got home I showered, ate lunch, did some crossword puzzles, and started drawing. It was an awesome day up until that point. Soon after, I heard about protesters downtown and on the 101 holding up traffic. They were protesting in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police. Soon I was seeing friends videos on Instagram of people smashing car windows, police firing tear gas & rubber bullets, crowds throwing objects at the police, a trash bin on fire in the middle of the street, a car running over people, people looting a Starbucks, a cop getting knocked out. This shit is crazy and there are protests/demonstrations/riots happening in multiple cities across the US. I wonder if this is going to continue through the weekend and what will happen in its wake.

It finally cooled down enough for a couple hours, before the sun went down, for me to draw a few more eyes & mouths. Since I took a couple days off I did some extra warming-up.

I can deal with the heat but the last couple days I haven't been able to work on my Eyes & Mouths piece because my goddamn arms get all sweaty and I would ruin the paper while drawing on it. It feel like I've been thrown all sorts of curveballs since I've been working on these larger pieces. Now I need to figure out a solution or wait till the temperature drops.