One World Flag Reflection

Shawna P.

One World Flag

Adobe Photoshop

December 10, 2012

***Update November 17, 2015 ***
To people wondering if they can use my flag (or an overlay of it etc) on their Facebook or other media: I'm honoured that you like my work and want to use it. You're welcome to use it wherever you like, though credit and/or a link back here would be greatly appreciated. Thanks very much!

Technical

I found a lovely vector image of the world that was absolutely MASSIVE so I scaled it down and used the background eraser tool to take out the white background, leaving me with just the land. I scaled that to my liking and coloured it green, because green is the universal colour for earth and environment, so it wouldn’t be particular to any one colour. I crossed white lines across the screen diagonally, horizontally, and vertically, then combined them into a single layer and used the twirl option in the distort menu to twist it left, then right on another layer. I duplicated the layer again and twirled it less this time, forming a sort of web around the world. Next I found vector art of men and women and children to surround the world like paper doll cutouts. I had to add arms to the little boy and girl, which I just cut out from the parents and made smaller to add on.

Idea/Concept

I knew that I wanted to use circles in my art, and also convey that all people were connected. Thus I put the world inside a circle and had people surround it, holding hands in a circle. I hadn’t planned on using the web around the earth, however, that was a happy accident when I decided to fiddle with the twirl option. I quite liked the effects, so I altered it to my liking.

Influences

I didn’t have any particular influences on this project. I haven’t really seen any other renditions of a ‘world flag’, so any similarities to existing world flags are coincidental.

Composition

I balanced the composition rather symmetrically, except for the world in the centre. This is because most actual country flags that I observed were very simple and symmetrical. I drew attention to the map of the world in the centre by having all of the outside lines connect to it and weave around it like an interconnecting web. The bold black of the people surrounding the world is the next thing you notice, and because it’s in a circle it draws your attention around the ring and back to the centre, where the world is. I wanted the world to be the focus because this is a world flag and every country is shown within it.

Motivation

I wanted to see if I could create a professional-looking flag with very minimal pictures and texture, and I think that I succeeded. Most of our Media Arts assignments focus on blending pictures and putting it all together so that it makes the viewer think, but this assignment was more of a challenge because it had to be direct and simple, yet still interesting. It was a challenge I gladly took up.

Critical Assessment

I was very happy with how the web behind the world turned out. Because I created it by just experimenting, it made me very happy and was a nice surprise to have it look so nice. It worked for the picture as a whole because it represented how everything was interconnected in a web.

I originally had the background as white and the outline of my circle surrounding the earth in black, but by changing the background to blue and everything else to white, I was surprised by how much things popped. Suddenly the whole picture was much more eye-catching and appealing through a simple change of colour.

I would have liked to come up with a better colour for the people surrounding the earth, since I think that perhaps the black is too bold and should be toned down slightly. I originally had tried colouring each person a different shade of grey to represent how everyone is unique and no one is simply black and white, but the resulting effect was not what I had wanted so I discarded it in favour for the black.