My mom has this habit when she draws: she never plans the expression first. She just starts with a simple line — sometimes the head shape, sometimes one eye — and somehow the whole mood of the character comes out of that one accidental decision.
It’s funny because when I was a kid, I used to ask her,
“Why is he smiling like that?”
And she’d say, “I don’t know, he decided it. Not me.”
It sounded silly back then.
Now I kind of get it.
When she draws Little Francky, the expression is always a little unexpected. It’s rarely a big, dramatic emotion. It’s more like a tiny thought he’s having. A shy smile, a confused blink, a soft frown that doesn’t look sad — just thoughtful. Sometimes he doesn’t look like he knows where he is, which honestly makes him even more charming.
What I love is that none of it is intentional.
She doesn’t erase. She doesn’t redo.
She just lets the character “be” however he comes out.
There’s something refreshing about that. Most art today feels very deliberate — planned, polished, optimized for something. But my mom draws the way people used to write in the margins of notebooks: casually, quietly, the way you’d hum a song you didn’t realize you remembered.
I told her once that people online liked Francky’s expressions.
Her reaction was exactly the same face she draws on him — a bit surprised, a bit shy, not sure how to react.
But I think that’s why people connect with him.
He doesn’t look posed.
He looks like he just wandered into the frame and is trying to make sense of things.
Maybe that’s how a lot of us feel anyway.
And maybe that’s why I keep coming back to my mom’s drawings — there’s something honest in the way she lets small expressions appear without forcing them. They feel real in a way polished things sometimes don’t.
Little Francky wasn’t designed to be relatable.
He just… turned out that way.
