Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine (France)

France is going to pass through a territorial reorganization, with smaller regions merged into "super-regions". One of them is Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine.

The territory of future super-region is going to comprise the current regions of Alsace, Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine.

Alsace	Alsace (previous)
Champagne-Ardennes	Lorraine

I don't think it's one of my best works, but it's still worthy to share a proposal I designed:


The four quarters are taken from flags with a diagonal stripe, so I decided to arrange them forming a saltire. They are, respectively: Haut-Rhin, Bas-Rhin (mirrored), Champagne-Ardennes (mirrored) and Lorraine. Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin are the two provinces of Alsace, notice how the regional flag is a mix of both.

The result can be a little odd, but not less funny.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.
I'll try something more elaborate next week.

Burgundy (France)

Burgundy is now a historical and administrative region of France. With times of more and less autonomy, it was, historically, one of most important regions of Europe.

These days, I was reading about a Burgundian trying to find a better flag for his region. The current flag is a complex banner of arms, quartering the arms of the houses of Valois-Burgundy and Burgundy.


An obvious choice would be the historical "cross of Burgundy", a very clever design but, nowadays, possibly much more related to the former Spanish Empire than the French region.


As I wanted a simple design, I decided to focus on the second and third quarters, from the original House of Burgundy. It could have been a good choice alone, but I decided to add elements from the House of Valois-Burgundy, that expanded the duchy to its maxime extension.

Considering this, I created this flag design:


The fleurs-de-lis is typical to French flags, the red and white border being more unique. The counterchanged border is more harmonic to the center and, in my opinion, not too far from original.

Comments are welcome.
Hope everybody commemorated International Heraldry Day (June 10th).

Pan-celticism

A thread on Flags Forum gave me the idea to resurrect an old sketch I made to represent the Celtic League but de facto all the pan-Celtic movement i.e. the supporter to bigger contact between the "Celtic nations".

There isn't an official pan-Celtic, but two flags are most commonly used. This is the most popular:

This flag is made with the amalgamation of flags of seven Celtic nations, from top left, in clockwise direction: Galicia, Ireland (in this case, not only the Republic of Ireland, but in a pan-Irish context), Scotland, Cornwall, Isle of Man, Wales and Brittany. Other common variant have only the six original celtic nations, removing Galicia. In the center, a triskelion, a motif common in celtic art.

The other one is a proposal by Robert Berthelier in the 1950s:

This flag have green and golden yellow colors, commonly associated with the Celts, and two conjoined triskelions (in the style of a celtic knot), representing three Gaelic peoples - Scot, Irish and Manx - and three Brittonic peoples - Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

The sketch that I had (as said in first paragraph) is heavily influenced by Andrew Boada's amazing "Irish Celtic Cross". Here is it:

This flag has the same colors of the Berthelier's proposal, with the addition of white. It represents a Celtic cross, but touching the borders instead of square as the latter is used by Neo-Nazis. I like how this flag is simple and vivid. But, to avoid any misconception, I made the reference to celtic flag much more subtle on my next proposal:

It's very much like the anterior flag, with the exception that a white triskelion was added on the center of the flag.

As you can see, the designs don't have any very original approach, but I think them may work well.

Your comments are always welcome.

I've been making the last posts trying to fix the issue of multiple blank lines, specially on cell phones. Comment if it still appear on your browser.

Amazonia Region

The Amazon rainforest is the biggest rainforest in world, with the biggest basin and the biggest river in world. But it's divided between nine countries — Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and the French oversea department of French Guyana —, so it's hard to preserve this precious treasure. So, today I'll show a flag prototype I made to pay tribute to Amazonia, one of more important human heritages. It's like this:

How I said above, it's just a prototype, and probably you'll see "Amazonia Region II" or "Amazonia Region III" someday. The green has an obvious meaning, hasn't it? It's the rainforest! There are nine slim stripes, symbolizing the nine aforementioned countries. One of those stripes (the central one) is thicker, because it symbolizes the Amazon River, that cross the South American continent in horizontal direction.

The blue is the water, and the white means Life, the lives of animals, plants, living beings, but mainly the noble peoples that inhabit this region. It's a flag to the people from Amazonia, not a political flag, or something like this — but, if someday all the "Amazonic" countries really unite to preserve this heritage, one of that would be needed.

It's a prototype, I'm going to work to improve it.
Please, comment and disclose the blog. Your contribution is very important to me!