Stars and Stripes

In this assignment, the only thing that we were told was to incorporate red, white, blue, stars, and stripes. The idea itself was up to the artist. As you can see, I decided to take a political stance and have an immigrant child behind bars of red and white, while crying tears of blue with stars in them. This is supposed to represent what the immigrants are going through just to get to our country, such as being separated from their loved ones and be trapped from what the wanted. I really wanted to take a political stance, since I think art is a great opportunity to show, visually, how people truly feel about a certain subject or topic. I thought that the subject on immigration could be great visually, since children are affected as well, and seeing that could have a huge impact.

In this project, I mainly used charcoal, both grays and whites, and then colored pencil for the red, white, and blue. I wanted to use charcoal because charcoal seems to impact the quality of the value and texture in a positive, and bolder way. With charcoal, you can see the little details more clearly, and elements become more obvious to the viewer.

In this project, I used mainly value and color to create emphasis and contrast in my work. Value was a big key to creating this piece of work since I didn't want the work to appear too 2d or unrealistic. Without value to show off depth and perspective, the art would appear to be less serious then the topic actually is. Value is shown where details come into place, and also in the background. I wanted to have a dark background because it would've added a sense of darkness to the art work's story. This is where contrast took place, because of the dark background, it was more obvious that the subject was the boy, and highlighted the meaning. Emphasis took place where color was. Clearly, the only colors I could use were red, white, and blue, but I also wanted to make sure that when I did add the colors, it would seem more abstract. This is why I made the tears look unrealistic, and the bars be red and white because I wanted to make it clear where I added the elements, and add emphasis to my art. I think this was the right thing to do because it's more obvious that it was intended on having meaning, instead of just having the entire thing be realistic. My project didn't evolve much from its original idea, I think once I had the idea, I wanted to stick exactly with it. If I could take more steps with this art, I would probably add more value to the boy's face; I think I was being a little bit too cautious, but if I were to go back I would make details more evident.