Waving flag effect
These instructions were provided by Dan Rhatigan.
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I started with a vector shape of the waving flag (taken from SVG artwork for the trans pride flag), made sure it was 1200 pixels wide, and converted that to a guideline shape.
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Scale the width of the SVG flag artwork to match the width of the guideline. If the flag had a different proportion, adjust the height of the guideline, but keep the width.
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I created a black border shape equal to the size of the rectangular flag art, with a stroke thickness of 30 pixels, and then convert that to a path, set to 30% opacity.
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Select the flag artwork and border, and apply Object ➤ Envelope Distort ➤ Make with Mesh… with a grid of three columns and one row.
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Edit the contours of the Envelope object to match those of the guideline. It’s a bit tricky: the nodes for columns 1 and 3 have to be moved 40 pixels away from the center to create thinner columns at the outside and thicker columns in the center. (See diagram bellow). After that, shift the nodes vertically and edit the contours at the top and bottom of the shape to curve like the guideline shape.
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That’ll give you the color SVG art, and then you have to ungroup all the artworks and start merging and removing elements as needed to create the black-only fallback artwork.
