Stars and Stripes

The elements that had to be included in this painting were stars, stripes, color (red, white, blue), and unity. I decided to do a landscape that included all of these elements. I started out by doing one in watercolor but it was really difficult to get the colors to be solid, especially around the stars. The first painting was messy looking and I had a lot of time left to work on this project so I started another one using acrylic paints. I designed a new landscape because I thought the first one was really simple and not very interesting. I knew I wanted to have the stars reflected in water so I added in a river. Acrylics made it a lot easier to take my time outlining the stars and I could still go over them with white paint if I messed up. I did a couple layers of dark blue which made the color pretty solid. The most difficult part of this painting was the red and white stripes. I made the red a little darker which made the layers super thin. It took forever to paint the stripes and then clean up the lines with white . Some of the red mixed with the white which I mostly covered up but it is still slightly noticeable. I got really tired of painting so many layers of red so I decided they looked good enough.

The elements of art that I used in this painting are line, shape, color, and value. I used line in the stripes and shape in the stars. I used color in the red, white, and blue. I used value in the different shades of blue in the mountains and the sky. The principles of design that I used are unity, pattern, and balance. The stars show unity because they are all the same size, shape, and color. The star and stripes are patterns, and the mountains are balanced because there is one larger mountain on each side of the paper.

I came up with the idea to do a landscape because I wanted to practice painting landscapes. Something about this painting I think I could improve is the red stripes because they are not as solid as I wanted them to be.