American flag inside country map outline

American flag inside country map outline

A while ago I did an article explaining how to create a country’s flag inside its map outline and I used as an example the Australian map and flag. I’ve since had a lot of interest from Australians who wanted to use the image so I thought I’d do one for Americans as I get a lot of visitors from the United States.

I employed a very similar technique for this one as I did the other one. First, I got from a Google image search the country outline of the USA and a picture of the stars and stripes. I turned the country outline into vector form by using Adobe Illustrator’s Live Trace. The flag I re-created manually in Illustrator.

Once the flag was finished, I grouped all the objects and position the country map outline over the flag and, with both selected, I went Object > Clipping Mask > Make (Cmd/Ctrl-7) to give the flag the outline of the country.

I then copied this and pasted it into a Photoshop document and added a Bevel and Emboss and a slight Drop Shadow layer style.

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This article was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Illustrator, Photoshop.
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17 Responses to “American flag inside country map outline”

  1. Article Rewriter, on May 23rd, 2008 at 7:14 pm, said:

    Lovely image.
    I like the shading. It looks very patriotic.
    I may design a similar one for the UK.

  2. Qaswer, on May 25th, 2008 at 1:17 pm, said:

    Fantastic job but not easy for a newbie like me. Although you have given details but it is still not possible to create that.

  3. Rob Cubbon, on May 26th, 2008 at 9:49 am, said:

    Thank you Article Rewriter and Qaswer. Qaswer, do you have Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator? Did you follow the links to earlier tutorials I’d written? Let me know exactly where the problem is. :)

  4. Roll top desk, on May 29th, 2008 at 10:40 am, said:

    Nice trick ;-) Photoshop is such a powerful tool, isn’t it?

  5. GolDenOne, on June 7th, 2008 at 3:05 pm, said:

    Wow, I like it!!! Cool…

  6. Free Vector Clip Art, on June 9th, 2008 at 9:26 am, said:

    Very cool image, I find live trace very difficult – vector magic is a good bitmap to vector tool also, but you have to pay for a subscription. Cool image though man, good work. :)

  7. dshot, on June 10th, 2008 at 8:46 am, said:

    I like the little shadow around the US. It makes it pop more. Good Work!

  8. Rob Cubbon, on June 11th, 2008 at 11:33 pm, said:

    Thank you, Roll top desk, GolDenOne, Free Vector Clip Art and dshot for your comments and support.

  9. Rama kanth, on June 14th, 2008 at 10:51 am, said:

    Wow , Very nice image

  10. Safety Protection Technology, on June 30th, 2008 at 3:46 pm, said:

    I have Adobe CS2 and I think that I can do this with that. Truly I visit many other photoshop blogs but I haven’t seen such stuff anywhere else.

  11. Rob Cubbon, on July 1st, 2008 at 10:49 am, said:

    Thank you Rama kanth and Safety Protection Technology. You can definitely do this with CS2.

  12. Victoria, on September 17th, 2008 at 12:19 pm, said:

    I wish I was able to do these kind of graphics myself. I’m always in awe at people who can. It looks so real to me. How long did this take to make anyway?

  13. Rob Cubbon, on September 17th, 2008 at 1:13 pm, said:

    Hello Victoria. If you have the relevant software just follow the instructions and you’ll be creating this sort of graphic easily. It didn’t take me long, less than half an hour.

  14. find home insurance, on September 22nd, 2008 at 1:04 am, said:

    Good Layout and Design. I like your blog. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. .

  15. How to market yourself #4: What to write in your blog or website | Freelance Graphic Designer London, on January 1st, 2009 at 3:56 pm, said:

    [...] certain jobs. The subjects of these have been: interactive and rich media PDFs; pop art; creating countries’ map outlines and flags; WordPress for website creation. Quite a mixed bag. But if someone wants to ask me to do something [...]

  16. Marz, on April 7th, 2009 at 4:56 pm, said:

    Very, very, cool. Just what I am looking for a project that I am working on.

    M

  17. Rob Cubbon, on May 17th, 2009 at 12:52 pm, said:

    Thanks, for your comments guys, always good to get subscribers. Thanks, Marz.

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