Armory – Page 7 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Common and Uncommon Armorial Elements

Someone recently asked if there was an listing of which charges had been used most or least often in the Society’s armory. It turns out that this isn’t an easy question to answer using the standard Morsulus armorial interface, but since I’ve imported that data into a SQL database I was able to put together a query that generates such a listing.

The data below is current as of the LoAR dated January 2018, which was posted in March. It includes over fifty thousand total registered armory items, including those which have since been released.

Some other important caveats result from the way this listing was constructed:

It includes all of the armorial description categories, so in addition to charges, the listing also shows the frequency of field tinctures, divisions, treatments, and arrangements.
This listing is based on the categories as coded in the armorial database, so it doesn’t distinguish between individual charge types that are grouped under a common heading; in other words, lions, panthers, domestic cats and their cousins are all grouped together under “cat.”
Some individual charges are grouped under one category but are considered to also conflict with charges that appear under other categories; in other cases, a single category includes multiple types of charges which don’t conflict with each other.

Continue reading “Common and Uncommon Armorial Elements”

Armory Conflict-Checking Resources

One of the seemingly-black arts of Society heraldic practice is checking new device and badge designs for conflicts against registered armory.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now and still need to ask for help or get other heralds to double-check my work, so I thought it might be useful to post a few links to some of the resources I use to try and remind myself of how the process works.

OSCAR Color Gamuts

While there are a wide range of colors that can be used for digital renditions of heraldic art, the set of colors that gets discussed most often in the context of SCA submissions is the one used for OSCAR’s “color checker” display.

When armory images are uploaded to OSCAR, color-checker thumbnails are generated which convert each area to one of these standard tinctures. This doesn’t mean you should use those specific colors in your graphics, but it does simplify things if the colors in your image are not transformed incorrectly.

Heraldic Tincture Hexcodes

[Update, January 2021:] See the updated version of this post for better images with more hexcodes than are included here.

Any set of colors can be used as heraldic tinctures if they can be interpreted easily and unambiguously.

Below are examples of color palettes I’ve used for pieces of armory. (Click for a larger image, or download a printable PDF with additional examples.)

Ordinaries and Divisions and Arrangements, Oh My!

[Update, January 2024:] For the latest version of this document, see Ordinaries, Divisions, and Arrangements Revisited which includes a few additional terms.

While the language of blazon used to describe armory is filled with hundreds of specialized terms which need to be memorized individually, at its core there’s a set of basic terms that describe a matrix of related ordinaries (simple geometric charges defined by their relationship to the field), divisions (lines splitting the field or a charge into two tinctures), arrangements (placements of charges in a group), and orientations (alignments of charges in a particular direction).

Heraldic Templates

Torric inn Björn’s Heraldic Templates was published in 1992 and is, as far as I know, the earliest collection of art distributed specifically to facilitate tracing in construction of society armory.

It has fallen out of circulation and was not been available online until now. Lord Torric has recently granted permission for this material to be re-published, for which he has my sincere thanks.

A Glossary of Heraldic Terms

In addition to 45 pages of traceable art, Torric inn Björn’s 1992 collection of Heraldic Templates also contains a ten-page glossary which contains many of the specialized terms used in society blazons, as well as defining the default position of many charges.

It has fallen out of circulation and was not been available online until now. Lord Torric has recently granted permission for this material to be re-published, for which he has my sincere thanks.

I have converted this document to a web-accessible format and posted it online in hopes that it may prove useful to current practitioners.

Name and Device for Seònaid inghean mhic Aoidh

Seònaid is new to the society, but has thrown herself into it full throttle, and only a few weeks after her first event had designed a device and come up with an authentic name, making my job as herald relatively easy — with just a little fiddling around the edges we were able to get her ideas into registrable shape and submitted.

Per saltire azure and argent, four mullets counterchanged.

The design Seònaid came up with is nice and simple, as were the best period designs.

The fact that there were no conflicts was a pleasant reminder of how much available design space remains open in the society’s armorial.

The Submission Escutcheon

A recent question on a society heraldry Facebook group about the dimensions of the escutcheon on the submission forms reminded me that I never posted the comparison outline I put together last year showing how it diverges from the geometric construction typically used to create this “heater shield” shape.

The most common technique for drawing a heraldic escutcheon, shown in red below, is to lay out a rectangle which is three times as wide as it is tall, then add a pair of quarter circles below it, enclosing the area where they overlap.

The escutcheon on the society’s submission forms, shown in black below, is slightly different; the curve starts lower and then pinches in more steeply.

On Using Your Mundane Armory

A member of our province recently asked “What happens if a person with mundane arms joins the SCA? Can they use their mundane arms as SCA arms? And what happens if there’s a conflict with existing Society arms?”

The answer to the first question is found in the Administrative Handbook of the College of Arms, section III.B.7., “Armory Used by the Submitter Outside the Society,” which reads: