Today, while I was hiking, I sketched out some important periods in my life in regards to art & drawing. My earliest memories of drawing rocket ships with my cousin when we were little. Being a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fanatic and learning how to draw them like the cartoon. Being bored in middle school classes and doodling on my class work. Taking my first art class, meeting other artists and acquiring my first sketchbook in high school. In junior college, still uninterested in class, my first job working in a clean room and going out and doing graffiti at night. I haven’t figured out which specific events I’d like illustrate to cover the last 20 years of my so called artsy-fartsy life.

Today I went through my collection of trading cards & comic books that I’d been saving since the early to mid 90s. Most of the trading cards are shit so I’ll be getting rid of them. I’ll probably keep some of the comics and reread them. I’m gonna take the rest of my 25+ year old collection to the flea market as part of this recent purge and hopefully others will find joy in them and bring them home.

Tonight I went through a tub full of my old sketchbook and labeled them with the years I drew in them. My oldest sketchbook was from my senior year in high school. 1999. I’m planning on scanning old drawings and using them in zines.

Tonight I inked a little bit of Michelangelo from a sketch I drew last year. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were one of the main reasons I started drawing, back in the late 80s & early 90s. I liked the cartoon so much that I would draw the turtles over & over to try till they sorta resembled the cartoon.

I finally went through all the drawings and sketches I've been hoarding over the years and organized them into piles. One pile is old drawings from middle school & high school, making them 20-25 years old. The other piles are of monsters, aliens, head things, shape things, graffiti, video games as well as a large stack to trash or repurpose. The reason I went through all of them today was to look for an old sketch I did in high school of my buddy Victor's band name, QMI. He ordered a t-shirt of mine yesterday so I wanted to surprise him with a custom button when I ship it to him so I redrew the artwork digitally and colored it in. The design might be a little too detailed for a 1.5" button but I'll find out tomorrow when I print it out.

I bought a bike today and it fits in the back of my car. I’m pretty stoked. I’d been thinking about buying a bike since last year and I’m glad I finally pulled the trigger. I went to Good Karma Bikes in San Jose. They’re a non-profit organization that sells refurbished bikes and does repairs. The last time I owned a bike was in high school, a Frankensteined bmx bike that I mostly rode around at night after sneaking out of the house. The next time I’d ride a bike would be at this thing called “Bike For Beers” in downtown. It was an event where mobs of people cruised on their bikes to different houses where they had kegs of beer and punk bands performed. That was about 15 years ago and I borrowed a bike for that. Now, with this bike, I plan on using it at normal hours doing normal shit.

I did this just for fun. When I was a kid I loved Ninja Turtles so much I remember drawing them over & over till they looked sorta like they did in the 80s-90s cartoon.

For as long as I’ve been around, and before I was born, my dad’s side of the family always got together to celebrate on Christmas Eve. It’s always been a big deal for the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces & nephews. It’s a long running tradition that had to be canceled this year because of Covid. Yes, it’s a bummer but today wasn’t a bad day. I hiked a couple more trails at the Sierra Vista Preserve this afternoon and got a little bit closer to completing the whole space. I just need to do the Upper Calaveras Fault Trail, east of the Cutoff Trail, and the Lower Calaveras Fault Trail, which is a doozy. Just the Lower Calaveras Fault alone is almost 10 miles round trip and a 5-6 hour trek. I’m thinking of doing one hike to finish the Upper portion and coming back another day, nice & early, to knock out the Lower part. Depending on the weather the next few days, and how much it rains, I might be able to 100% complete the preserve before the new year.

These remind of when you’d get your assignment back from the teacher and they marked all the mistakes you made. The best was when you had the opportunity to fix the mistakes and turn it back in for a better grade. That’s basically what I’m doing here. I’m going for that A++++

My grandma is visiting and, since we have plenty of time to kill at home, I thought it'd be a great time to start a new puzzle together. We did one a last year and it was a lot of fun. It's really interesting to see how my grandma tackles the puzzle versus the way I do it. She groups pieces by color then starts trying to put them together. I like grabbing pieces then looking at the poster to figure out where they go. That's how we roll. We're a few hours into this puzzle, and as you can see in the picture below, we're using two tables to work on it. I think the puzzle we did last year only took us a couple days and I kinda hope this one takes a little longer. If we finish early I'll probably go and buy another puzzle and maybe a game to pass the time with grandma.

My cousin Reyna sent me this picture earlier today. It's Arely and I standing in front our booth at the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest last year. The sales weren't great that weekend but it was still a lot of fun being there and meeting new vendors. I really miss working events. The plan was to do more events this year before the 'Vid fucked that all away. 

I ordered a small drafting table this afternoon that's scheduled to arrive on Friday. I've been wanting a table with an angled drawing surface for a while. After working on those large ink drawings for weeks my back began to hurt, most likely from being hunched over a flat table for hours at a time. I put off working on my "protester" drawing, which still isn't done being penciled, till I got a proper desk. It wasn't very expensive, so I hope isn't dogshit. The reviews were pretty good and I like that it's very basic, just the tilting surface and height-adjustable legs. I even got the last black one in stock.

And in other news... I was going thru boxes of old drawings and snapped a few pictures of drawings I did in my early teens.

1. Power Rangers Suck (1994)  - I think I drew this in summer school between the 5th & 6th grade. I don't know what my beef was with the Power Rangers but I copied the cover of Green Day's album, "Dookie," to shit on the them.

2. Ozzy Osbourne (1995) - This was long before the The Osbournes TV show. I copied the characters that were pulled off the internet in 94-95. I think my cousin Dani printed out a webpage for me at her parents house one day. It might have been my first introduction to the internet. I took the pages home and redrew the little Ozzy characters.

3. Inside an Alien Ship (1996) - I'm not sure if I pinched this too but I definitely took Alien Workshop, an actual skateboard brand, from the ads in Thrasher magazines. I still love this drawing, there's so much to look at, I might redraw it.

Last night I started reading Lord of the Flies again. I had to read it in middle school or high school as an assignment but I don't remember much besides the general story of a bunch of young kids getting stranded on a deserted island and becoming savages. What I'll never forget is a scene from the 1990 movie where they kill the character named Piggy. He was a dorky fat kid in glasses and I saw myself in him cause I was/am a dorky fat kid. I think that scene scarred me for life. It's a short book and I'm 3 chapters in right now. When I'm done I'm gonna rewatch the 1963 black & white movie and the 1990 color version. 

After posting this on Instagram someone commented about a real life "Lord of the Flies," where 6 Tongan schoolboys got shipwrecked and stranded on a deserted island for 15 months in 1966. Their story was a much happier than this book by William Golding.

Except for go on a walk and make this animated gif.

I'm calling this one finished, even I could have spent many more hours tweaking it. I originally drew it 8 years ago. It was inspired by my walks to school every morning, listening to cassettes on my Walkman. 

I came across a picture of a Tiger Electronic game on Instagram today and got the idea to draw my own. Tiger Electronic sold a bunch of these cheap LCD games back in the 90s based on arcade and console games. I think I had the Double Dragon handheld. It was a piece of shit compared to the real game. They all were.

*batteries not included

I took a bunch of photos while I was working on my first Cells painting years ago. I knew I wanted to make something with the photos afterwards so I made a time-lapse of the cells multiplying from the center out (starts at the 1:22 mark) Everything leading up to that is the painting process, cans I used, my workspace, feral kittens, and notes that I scrawled everywhere including the cans.

Here are a few details about the piece: The red can of MTN 94 is only used once as a 5 sided shape in the center. Everyone other color was used multiple times to make 5 & 6 sided shapes until they bled off the sides. I made sure no shape was touching, or too close to the same color shape, so they're all spread out evenly. The 2nd large scale Cells painting I made (Cells MK2) looks very similar but I used a completely different process. For the second one I mapped it all out on my computer first then painted one whole set of the same color at a time. 

I originally posted this on an old YouTube which is still up bit no longer active. Before using the alias Frankie Mcfly I used the handle I Draw Weird Stuff. The song I used is "Singing' In The Rain" by Mint Royale (used without permission) and it synced up almost too perfect.

My friend Arely Cardenas, along with artist Jesse Hernandez, were commissioned to paint a mural during a Google conference, in collaboration with Local Color, a few months back and today it was donated to James Lick High School in East San Jose, CA. A faculty member walked me to the new building for the unveiling and as we walked thru the old halls I told her I went to summer school here in 1998. I went to Mount Pleasant High School, which was a couple miles away, flunked a bunch of classes my freshman & sophomore year and had to make them up during junior & senior year. It was that summer in between. MP didn't offer classes that summer so all our dumb asses went to Lick. 

That was also the summer The Beastie Boys released the album Hello Nasty. My friends and I went to go buy the CD when it came out at Circuit City (by Eastridge Mall) after school on a Tuesday.

Lately I've been uploading old drawings onto Instagram. I drew these in a sketchbook back in 2010. I wasn't drawing a whole lot at the time and these were exercises to fill up whole pages using ink without fucking up.

December 26th, 1980. That's the day I was hatched. My mom said if I was born on the Christmas she would have named me Jesus. Yikes! It's always been a shitty day for a birthday. When I was a kid my Christmas presents doubled as birthday gifts. When I got older, people were too tired & broke after the holidays. It's not fun. I once joked to my cousins about switching my birthday to different date and they threw me a surprise birthday party on that day, months after my actual birthday. That was pretty cool. Today I didn't feel like doing anything special. All I did was treat myself to some Mongolian bbq for lunch.

Bah humbug! Here are some old Xmas themed doodles of mine.

I'm heading out of town soon to hang with the family-bamily so I'm posting this now so I don't forgot and miss two in a row. Enjoy these old Xmas themed pics: Me as Santa, My homemade ugly sweater  with decapitated polar bear head and a Secret Satan gift tag. Happy Holidays from me to whoever's reading this shit.

8 years ago I joined my buddies non-profit group known at the time as Mexico Extravaganza. The year before I joined they put on a theater production called "Monarca" and they were gonna do it again. One of the scenes involved a large tree in the background. Someone had built them a tree the year before but they needed something bigger so they asked for my help. We went to the hardware store and bought two or three 2-inch thick 8'x4' styrofoam panels, paint and supplies. I think I shaped it with a knife and boxcutter then cut the grooves with my Dremel. I brushed on a lighter shade of brown inside the grooves then rolled on a darker brown on the surface to highlight the texture. When it was done it was 16' tall and about 10' wide at the bottom. In the end I think it was too tall so they had to chop off a few feet. I only built the trunk and someone else made the top. I don't remember if I got a chance to watch the show. I might if had to work that day. I think all I saw was the picture below.

I've been cleaning house these last few days. Knocking out some to-dos, clearing out email and deleting old shit. Today I came across the flyer for my first, and only, solo art show. (October 1st, 2011 at 8:00 PM,) an animated gif I made from a drawing (Plantimal,) and a crappy picture of the Hoverboard prop I made for my Marty Mcfly Halloween costume many-many moons ago (that's where Frankie Mcfly came from)

And in other news:

• The date for my next scheduled art show is Friday, May 1, 2020
• I've added a Contact page & form to this website