Soldier flag - making waves

The current design for the flag with soldiers and poppies on it is static and not very interesting because the flag is flat ad doesn't have any ripples in it. I've been wondering for the last few days as to how I could do this, because I don't know any fancy Photoshop techniques that can put this kind of effect on the flag design.

I searched up tutorials online, and followed on to wrap an image around another existing image (called mapping, in which I used an image of a plain white flag with ripples in it off the internet to be the base image to wrap my image of soldiers-poppies/NZ flag onto). This didn't really work at all. Here is my failed attempt.

How do people make a simple ripple appear through their image? I'll have to keep looking.

Further developing the soldier flag part 2

More altering of this poster design. Added a flagpole that bleeds off the page to make the image less passive and completely centred. Now it has a bit of movement and visual flow.
Played with tagline font - at first I had an old English type-writery font to reference the English history and the ANZAC soldiers, but I found that using the same font as the headline worked better, so I changed it to Bebas Kai.

I added a slight yellowy-orangey-browny coloured background tint to the image to make it more interesting and less like boring blank paper. I chose this colour because it is the colour of old, faded, historical paper and therefore has a link to history as well.

To do this week:

Further developing the soldier flag

 After critique about my last iterations of this poster (with the really small flag in the middle of the page) I did as suggested and made the flag huge, taking up as much room as possible on the page in order to have the most impact.
I played around with sizing and text placement and came up with a new headline, as "Take a closer look" isn't really relevant any more when the flag is big. The new tagline is "There's history in the fabric of our nation" and is a pun, referring to both our fabric = core and central concept of our country and culture, and fabric = the literal fabric, the flag.
Putting the text inside the flag saves room and integrates the text and imagery better.

Text flag poster idea

I was thinking of playing around with typography to create an image. Here are a few digital iterations of impactful words making up the flag. They are rather similar to my other, soldier-and-poppy poster design layout-wise though.
I made a lot of different iterations with different text, because I was trying to find exactly the right thing to say. I like how I used the letter 'T' and stretched it's tail to form the flag-pole - it's a nice, simplistic way of depicting one.

I coloured some of the words and letters red (and the rest blue) to make the text appear to be the New Zealand flag from a distance. This is very similar to the soldier-poppy flag, which is bad. Also, what is the visual rhetoric that I'm using? It's rather unclear.

Developing the soldier flag

I wanted the viewer to see both the flag as a whole and the soldiers and poppies that it's made of, so I decided to make the flag small - meaning that the viewer would have to come up to the poster to see it, and be drawn in. For this reason I also included a headline to encourage people to look a little closer, so it became "Take a closer look."

As a poster it isn't quite working at this stage, because people aren't grabbed by the passive placement of the image and there isn't much colour.

I experimented with fonts that would work, looking at old English-style fonts to reference history, but the one that I felt worked best with the style of the rest of the poster was Bebas Kai, a free font that I found online at www.dafont.com. The clean, simple lines and minimal style of the font give the text impact, but don't draw away the attention from the main focal point, the image.