June 2017 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Names and Arms for Sara and Giuseppe Sala di Paruta

Sara and Giuseppe live in our neighboring barony of Dragonship Haven. Her name and arms had been registered but she wanted to tweak them, while his were being registered for the first time.

Per pale sable and vert, a poodle salient contourny Or, collared and langued gules, and in sinister canton a bezant.

Sara already had similar arms registered, but with a talbot sejant, which she wanted to swap for a poodle salient.

Poodles are documented as period, being known from at least the fifteenth century. The poodle illustration is adapted from the submissions of Briana Heron of Caid, using the period shearing for water dogs without ornamental pompoms.

Name and Arms for Lady Angelica di Nova Lipa

Lady Angelica is an established member of the society, serving as the chatelaine of the Canton of Whyt Whey, but had never registered her name or arms, an oversight I was pleased to help correct.

Gules, eight fleurs de lys in annulo Or.

In our first round of consultation, Angelica identified red and gold as her preferred colors, and the Florentine fleur de lys as her desired primary charge, but pinning down the optimum arrangement required multiple iterations before this design emerged as the favorite.

Intellectual Property Rights In Branch Armory

An interesting point came up as part of the recent discussion of copyright and armorial registrations: what rights does the SCA as an institution have with regards to the images and designs used in devices and branches?

The question was triggered by an element of the Society’s rules found in section XII of the SCA’s “Corporate Policies” document, which is inexplicably difficult to locate online, but which can be found in a revision markup for changes made in 2013.

Copying Heraldic Art from OSCAR

I recently asked a group of heralds what the conventions were on copying heraldic art from OSCAR for re-use in other submissions, and thought it would be useful to write up some notes on the subject here for future reference.

Copying elements from previous submissions to use as clip art when creating new armory is not uncommon. While some heralds are great freehand illustrators, others are not (myself included), and being able to pull charges from an existing image and repurpose them allows those folks to assemble good-looking submissions for the registrants they are assisting.