Puunoa beach estates

drawing of blue board shorts with light blue and green flowers, blue waves, light blue and green beach ball, blue shell, blue waves, a palm tree, a blue bikini, blue waves, a blue shell, and a dark blue umbrella all in a row.
black outlined drawing of a shell, a beach umbrella, a palm tree, board shorts with flowers, a bikini, a wave, a beach ball, a smaller shell, and a smaller wave.

One of the clients I do work for at C&S Sales is a company called Destination Residences. They own many branches of hotels in Hawaii, one of which is Puunoa Beach Estates. For this project, I was asked to create artwork for the hotel that they could sell in their gift shop. They wanted something beachy that fit the overall feeling of the hotel. They were open to different ideas, but one thing they kept wanting to see was a pattern they could use on different items.

I started off by sketching different beach-themed items and icons in a sketchbook. Once I had narrowed down those sketches to ones I liked, I drew them in Illustrator using the pen and brush tool.

drawing of blue board shorts with light blue and green flowers, blue waves, light blue and green beach ball, blue shell, blue waves, a palm tree, a blue bikini, blue waves, a blue shell, and a dark blue umbrella scattered around.
drawing of blue board shorts with light blue and green flowers, blue waves, light blue and green beach ball, blue shell, blue waves, a palm tree, a blue bikini, blue waves, a blue shell, and a dark blue umbrella repeating to make a pattern.

Once I’ve laid out all my assets, I can move on to adding color. For this style, I used the blob brush tool to give the effect of coloring outside the lines. This is a fun way to turn something one-dimensional into a playful two-dimensional drawing with character.

Since this was originally going to be used as a pattern for different items, I went ahead and created a seamless pattern with my objects, then created a pattern swatch for it in Illustrator.

drawing of blue board shorts with light blue and green flowers, blue waves, light blue and green beach ball, blue shell, blue waves, a palm tree, a blue bikini, blue waves, a blue shell, and a dark blue umbrella repeating to make a pattern.

The next step in this project was mocking up the pattern on different products. Even if you start a project without knowing the kinds of items the customer will want the artwork on, it’s important to remain flexible and ready to adjust the artwork depending on the product. For the flip flops, the pattern works nicely and makes sense. On the tote, the full-color pattern going all the way to the edges might have looked weird, since the pattern couldn’t print on the fringe. Instead, I decided to do a strip of the pattern with the name of the hotel above it.

pattern mocked up all over a brown flip flop with black straps.
drawings mocked up on a canvas tote bag with fringe on edges being held by a woman in pants and a pink shirt.