Kakau Hawaiian Pale Ale Packaging First Draft

I've been designing a label for a class and decided to do a Hawaiian beer. I did several sketches of different Hawaiian images such as longboards, palm trees, whale flukes, manta rays, etc but I kept going back to sea turtles.

Sea turtles swim all around the islands but we got to see them while snorkeling off Black Rock in Maui. I wanted to incorporate sea turtles but there is already a beer in Fiji that uses a petroglygh type label.

Traditional Hawaiian tattoos use patterns similar to an art form called Zentangles and I thought it would be fun to adapt that into a label. The background uses a photograph of sea foam that I took in Florida and altered in Photoshop and Illustrator. The image of the turtle was inspired by a photo I took of the sea turtles at Xcaret.

I didn't care for the repeated turtle on the neck label and the label shape seemed a little rigid for such an organic illustration.