Bug My rectangle is invisible when I instantiate it

I made a function to make rectangles representing shields appear across the bottom of the screen and be able to resize them as more are added, but whenever I create a rectangle its invisible. I tried deleting its image component and replacing it with that of a rectangle that actually shows, but it's still invisible. Here's a screenshot of the inspector:
and here's the code in my function (i haven't gotten around to debugging it yet, just trying to get the rects to show):

Code (CSharp):

1.     void onIncreaseMax(int amountIncrease)
2.     {
3.         amountofshields += amountIncrease;
4.         foreach (GameObject item in shields)
5.         {
6.             Destroy(item);
7.         }
8.         float widthpershield = shieldswidth / amountofshields;
9.         float shieldscenter = widthpershield / 2;
10.         List<Vector2> tospawns = new List<Vector2>();
11.         for (int i = 0; i < amountofshields; i++)
12.         {
13.             Vector2 toadd = new Vector2(shieldscenter, shieldsheight);
14.             tospawns.Add(toadd);
15.         }
16.         List<Vector2> sizes = new List<Vector2>();
17.         for (int i = 0; i < amountofshields; i++)
18.         {
19.             Vector2 toadd = new Vector2(widthpershield - spacebetween, segmentheight);
20.             sizes.Add(toadd);
21.         }
22.         for (int i = 0; i < amountofshields; i++)
23.         {
24.             shields.Add(Instantiate(shieldori, tospawns[i], Quaternion.identity));
25.         }
26.         int eye = 0;
27.         foreach (GameObject item in shields)
28.         {
29.             RectTransform rct = item.GetComponent<RectTransform>();
30.             rct.sizeDelta = sizes[eye];
31.             eye++;
32.         }
33.     }

 

Turns out I wasn't childing my rectangles to my canvas. whoops