Education – Page 2 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

An Armory Conflict-Checking Checklist

[Editor’s Note: Portions of this checklist were rendered out-of-date by the new rules for considering changes to the field approved by the March 2021 Cover Letter. See the updated version of this document for a revised version of the checklist. — Mathghamhain]

SENA devotes over 10,000 words to conflict checking armory, which the below guide attempts to summarize.

It includes references to the relevant sections of SENA so you can track down more details if needed. Continue reading “An Armory Conflict-Checking Checklist”

Complex Lines Quick Reference

I keep forgetting which complex lines are considered to conflict with each other, so I put together this quick-reference guide in hopes that a visual presentation would help it to sink in. Continue reading “Complex Lines Quick Reference”

Artistic Variation in Heraldic Art

A notable characteristic of armorial depiction is that any illustration of a given design is considered to be heraldically equivalent. For example, any illustration of “Gules, three lions passant guardant in pale Or” is said to represent the English Sovereign, no matter in what style the lions are drawn, as long as they accurately reflect that blazon.

Konstantia Kaloethina has assembled a nice demonstration of this principle in her “Heraldic Mythbusting” blog post containing nine different illustrations of “a seraph proper” by six different artists.

Two seraphs proper; the first by myself using an illustration by Vinycomb, the second by Konstantia Kaloethina. (Shared with permission.)

In addition to these illustrations, the post provides some period examples of “artistic license,” explains some boundaries on when it’s taken too far, and discusses the Society’s heraldic registration policies — it’s definitely worth a read.

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.

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).

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.

Registration Basics Class Notes

At Whyt Whey’s recent Schola In The Solar event, I taught a heraldry class (my first!) covering the basics of registration for folks who were new to the society.

I put together a four-thousand-word writeup that outlined the process and covered some of the basic rules and jargon for both names and armory, which served both as an outline for my presentation and as a handout that people could take home with them for future reference.

I’ve posted it as a web page and as ten-page PDF file.

There’s definitely room for improvement, but I was pretty happy with how the session went, and look forward to teaching more classes in the future.

Every Distinct Tincture, Fur, and Field Treatment

A discussion earlier this year led me to the calculation that there were 97 heraldically distinct tinctures, furs, and field treatments recognized in the SCA, and this evening I figured I’d go ahead and sketch them all out.

The math works out as follows:

7 solid tinctures (2 metals plus 5 colors) +
10 neutral furs (every combination of 2 metals x 5 colors) +
20 ermine furs (2 metals ermined of 5 colors each, plus 5 colors ermined of 2 metals each) +
20 masoned (2 metals masoned of 5 colors each, plus 5 colors masoned of 2 metals each) +
20 papellony (2 metals papellony of 5 colors each, plus 5 colors papellony of 2 metals each) +
20 scaly (2 metals scaly of 5 colors each, plus 5 colors scaly of 2 metals each).