No Lifeguard on Duty

No Lifeguard on Duty - San Diego, CA

digital

2022

I just took a short trip over to San Diego, California and had a very nice time exploring the city and beaches. This Lifeguard tower in Coronado really caught my eye, and I thought that it’d work perfectly as a continuation on my series of using color and pattern as a means to emphasize architecture.

In my previous two illustrations, I chose to have a very limited color palette; both to help give an artistic poster-art style to the drawing, but also to challenge myself and to think how to create contrasts and focal points in a piece with only a few colors being used. With this drawing specifically, I focused heavily on the blues throughout, with a little bit of tan to serve as a complimentary color, yet still as a somewhat mute contrast.

What’s also important in this series is the incorporation of a pattern. It needs to have the goal of highlighting the architecture and scene being depicted in the foreground, but not being too distracting where it diminishes the point of the illustration in the first place.

With that consideration in mind, when trying to come up with a pattern that would compliment this tower nicely, beach life and the patterns of 1950s and 60s beach fashion came to mind; which incorporates striped patterns a lot in the towels, umbrellas, and bathing suits of that era. The stripes itself also seem to emphasize the repetitive nature of the waves in the background.