Flag Waves: House Flags From The National Maritime Museum

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Creating a new flag to promote your own business, root your favorite sports team, or show your allegiance to a cause or a community? Create a flag design that’s distinct and memorable, the kind you’ll be flying with pride for years to come.

According to 17 USC Section 105, the American flag is public domain. (Using a different flag? Most flags are free for anyone to use.) This means that you can use its image in your video projects and you don’t have to pay or credit anyone. Head over to the effects panel. (If it doesn’t show up in your window by default, go to Window > Effects.) Search for “wave warp”. Here’s the result of the work so far. The flat artwork we started with now looks much more like a real rippling flag—so much so that you barely notice that the design of the flag itself isn’t really rippling. Without changing anything, wave warp is pretty aggressive. It has fast, short waves and can feel pretty chaotic. To calm the effect to a gentle flap, I lessened the height to 6, the width to 142, and the speed to 1. You can adjust the effects in the timeline or in the effect controls to suit your video and intention. The Burn tool darkens the image; the Dodge tool brightens it. You can hold Alt or Option to temporarily access the Dodge tool. Drag another loop just above the original Burn loop, to add the highlight to the flag.Continue to add highlights above each fold. You should set the Dodge tool to about 50% strength, to avoid burning the gray of the Hard Light layer to pure white. Canva has a selection of stunning flag templates in a variety of styles and themes. Grab one and put your personal touch on the design with ease using our beginner-friendly drag-and-drop tools. Show your vibrant true colors The flag needs to be adjusted so the left side matches the tape that’s already attached to the pole. Drag the adjustment handles until it fits the shape. It doesn’t need to be exact. The folds created so far can look a little lumpy. So use the Smudge tool to smear the ends into more precise, tighter folds. Use a small brush, with a strength of around 90% for best results. Continued use of the Smudge tool can turn that coarse shading into something altogether more appealing. The good thing about the Smudge tool is that you can keep working away until you’re happy with the result.

It’s now an easy matter to drag those handles on the left, to change the flag’s distortion so that it better matches the flagpole. There’s only one handle on the Flag distortion, about a third of the way along the top edge. Grab it and drag it to create a more traditional flag shape. You can choose to wave it up or down; I’ve chosen to go up first.

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And there you have it—a simple waving flag animation! Of course, you can manipulate the wave warp values and set keyframes to change the way it waves throughout a video if you can’t handle a tutorial being this simple. Here’s our starting image: a flagpole and a flag, on separate layers. I’ve chosen the flag of Sweden to begin with, because it’s a simple design that will allow us to see the distortion and shading process clearly. We can change the design to whatever we want later. Now it’s time to adjust the rest of the flag so it’s waving more effectively. You can drag the handles, or the corner points, or the four interior intersections in Image Warp to move it around. Try to make it look less stiff by waving the edges in a more realistic, organic way. When you’re satisfied, hit Enter.