Stars and stripes design  

The main idea that guided my artwork was the idea that America is the "melting" pot of the world, something that personally resonates with me. In this piece there is the figure of a person seemingly melting into stripes, literally, this was a way to incorporate stripes into the design but figuratively aids in the meaning of the piece. America is unique is uniqe in the way that most of its current inhabitants are immigrants who are descendants of immigrants that came from every other place in the world. Because of this America is sometimes referred to as the melting pot of cultures. Personally, I connect to this because this resonated with my family. My grandmother immigrated from Vietnam to America to be with my grandfather whose own grandfather immigrated from France. They had my mother who moved to Germany to be with my German Father. Shortly after I was born we all moved to America. Every one of us has different cultural experiences and perspectives but we all melt into the mold of "American". 

This piece is a digital drawing and I used the program Procreate to make it. Procreate is my preferred digital program because I've been using it for a few years now and am well-versed in the tools and settings. One tool that I modified was the line and color brushes I like to use. I duplicated them and changed the settings slightly, mostly stabilization, to give me extremely smooth curved lines and coloring. I also created a star texture brush to use for the details in the hair and eyes. Creating custom brushes is something that I have done before for digital art and it makes it easier to draw repeating shapes or objects. I imported a generic picture of the American flag into Procreate and used the eyedrop tool to pick up the colors, I put them in a blank color pallet and then decreased the saturation of the blue and red over and over to get a gradient of each color. This is how I got the color pallet for the piece. 

At the very beginning of this project, I drew two thumbnail sketches to figure out how to use the design elements of the American flag in a drawing. The first one was the image of a girl in a dress with her hand up, from her hand flew stares and stripes into the sky. I liked this idea because it looked pretty but didn't choose it because it didn't mean much to me. Instead, I chose to go with my other sketch of a girl who was a combination of designed elements of the American flag. I did this to show that the girl was "American" she melts into the American flag not only to add that aspect of design but also to represent the idea that America is the melting pot of the world. I chose to use a gradient of colors for the skin and hair to add contrast and fucose attention to the face.   Overall this piece is supposed to represent a lot about me and all other Amaricans.