Hurley Title Card

With LOST just about to come to an end, I thought I'd pay tribute to it one more time before it's over.

I always liked the title cards at the beginning of old Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Some of them were true works of art. So here's my take on a title card if LOST was a Hanna-Barbera type of cartoon.

I've been a big fan of LOST ever since it premiered in 2004. I've seen every episode and I read a couple of show-related message boards, but even I have to admit that most of the time I have no idea what's happening on the show.

They crash on the island, they encounter the Others, then some other Others, then yet still some other Others, they see a smoke monster, they get off the island, they decide to go back, they crash again, they go back in time & visit the past for a while, they set off a nuke and now they both DID and DIDN'T crash on the island in the first place. It's a lot to have to sort out.

At one point I followed all these developments in minute detail, but around the last season it got to be too much and I gave up. I'm still watching, but I've decided to just go with the flow and stop trying to analyze everything that happens, and just watch the pretty pictures on the screen.

This had one of the longest gestation periods of any of my illustrations. I got the idea to do a title card of Hurley being chased by Smokey well over a year ago. I kept trying all these complicated layouts that just didn't work, no matter how I arranged them. I finally gave up in frustration and shelved the drawing. Then a week ago, while watching LOST, I remembered the drawing. I opened it up again, and suddenly a simplified layout that worked popped into my head and I drew it up. Ideas are like tomatoes. Sometimes they're not ready to be picked and need more time to ripen.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet. The yellow title text was hand lettered.



Here's the original digital sketch. It's not much to look at this time. There wasn't a lot of planning this time, as I mostly just made it up as I went along.



If you're not familiar with the title cards I'm always talking about, here are a couple of samples. Hanna Barbera used these on all their shows in the 1960s and 1970s. They kind of faded away after that, but some of the recent Cartoon Network shows have started using them again.