LOST And Found

Can you believe it's been ten years to the day since LOST first premiered? Yep, everyone's favorite show about that wacky supernatural time-traveling island first aired on Wednesday, September 22, 2004.

Yep, ten years after and I still have no idea what the hell was going on. Smoke monsters? A mysterious hatch? Magic numbers? A disappearing and reappearing island? Time travel? Flashbacks? Flashforwards? You'd go crazy you should try and figure it out.

And forget about that ending! The characters all end up in some heavenly waiting room? Four years after the final episode aired and I still don't know what the hell that was about. 

Now that I'm thinking about it, it's making me mad all over again. Six years of my life I devoted to that show, and that's the payoff I get? Thanks for nothing, LOST! I'm sorry I remembered your anniversary!

John Locke

Now that LOST is over, I've been re-watching the first season on DVD. What a different show it was in the beginning! In the first few episodes, the characters' main problem was trying to find food and fresh water. No flash forwards, time travel or heavenly waiting rooms to be seen anywhere.

My two favorite characters on the show were always Hurley and John Locke. I drew Hurley here and here, so I thought it high time to draw Locke.

It's downright criminal that the creators took the single most interesting character on the show and killed him off at the end of Season 4. Sure, we still got to see Terry O'Quinn's top notch acting for another two seasons, but he wasn't playing Locke anymore. He was the Smoke Monster pretending to be Locke.

Locke didn't get a chance at redemption or any kind of grand sendoff. His storyline just abruptly and senselessly ended. I kept expecting the real Locke to somehow come back to life at the last minute and defeat the fake Locke, but alas, it wasn't to be.

Anyway, here's my rendition of John Locke (the TV character, not the philosopher), if he was a Hanna-Barbera type of cartoon character. Apparently it's been a while since I drew any kind of human character. As I started to color Locke, I had to stop and think how to make flesh color!

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.
Here's the very rough preliminary sketch I did of Locke.

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.

Hurley Says I Rock!

Back in December I sent out my official custom-made 2009 Christmas Card. In addition to sending it out to friends and family, for some reason I got the notion to send one to Jorge Garcia, Hurley of TVs Lost. I'm not really sure why I sent one to him. I didn't expect anything out of it. I guess because I'm a fan of the show, and also a follower of his blog. Maybe I felt some sort of kinship with a fellow blogger.

Anyway, I mailed him a card and promptly forgot all about it. Then last week, I got a big envelope in the mail. Inside was this autographed photo of Jorge. Awesome!

Hurley says I rock, dude!

Hurley

It's everyone's favorite smoke monster-guarded, polar bear inhabited, time-traveling island resident!

Mr. Reyes gave me a lot of trouble as I was drawing him. I wanted him to have an animated look, and I could draw his body just fine, but when it came to his face, I just couldn't get it to look right. If I made it too cartoony, then it didn't look like him, and if I made it look more like him, then he didn't look cartoony enough. I went through a ton of revisions before I found the right balance.

The secret was to shrink his face inside his head, so that his features were smaller than they should be. Once I did that it seemed to click.

Originally the color scheme was much more garish, but I didn't think it was working. So I desaturated it quite a bit and that seemed to help.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.

By the way, Jorge Garcia has a blog too. It's a fun read. He seems like a nice guy.

Here's the original sketch of Hurley. Like I said, I was having trouble nailing the face. The eyes and mouth aren't bad on this one, but that nose is way off. The shape of his head isn't right either.



Here's another attempt. Getting closer, but there's still something off.



And lastly the final sketch. I finally figured out how to draw the shape of his head, and the face is pretty close and it's cartoony. Moral of the story: don't fall in love with your first attempt.

UPDATE!: I just looked at this drawing again and noticed that I messed up "the numbers." I had the last two in the sequence wrong for some reason. Either no eagle-eyed LOST fans noticed, or everyone was too polite to point out my stupidity. I fixed them, so they're right now.