The Face of the Nations

This is my second project; my flag. I knew from the start of this project that I wanted to do something that involved the flags of different nations of the world. I didn't like the first idea or two, because they didn't seem to carry much symbolism with them, or seemed more silly than I would have liked them to be.
Then I decided to make a face out of the countries' flags, representing kind of a "face of the world." I liked the idea a lot more than the previous ones. I ended up combining a variety of different flags (well over 50.), sometimes putting some together to form a pattern (like the ones around the eyes, the top being the Papau's flag and the bottom being Japan's flag). Since it was difficult to create shadow or contrast with the flags, since they were all fairly colorful or contained more than one color within them, I decided to dodge and burn the face afterwards to create more of a dimensional face. I decided to leave the background white to make it simplistic, as well as emphasize the flag-face.