Post Archive – Page 22 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Name for Gibbs Moryss

Gibbs is new to the SCA, but had done some other medieval-themed activities under that name and wanted to find a registrable equivalent that fit with their late-period English persona and paid homage to a grandfather named Morris.

Gibbs appears to have originally been a pet name or diminutive version of “Gilbert” before becoming established as a distinct name of its own. Morris seems to be an Anglicized version of the French “Maurice.” Both names came to England with the Norman invasion. Continue reading “Name for Gibbs Moryss”

A SQL Interface for the SCA Armorial

As powerful as the Morsulus O-and-A software is, it’s not particularly easy to install and get running on your own computer, and it’s a bit daunting to extend with new functionality.

I had an idea that it would be easier to work with the armorial data if it was loaded into a regular SQL database, and spent my weekend putting together a proof-of-concept implementation.

The results are available as Clerk-0.1.tar.gz, a pair of Perl scripts designed to work with a MySQL database. Continue reading “A SQL Interface for the SCA Armorial”

Interfaces to the Armorial Database

I’m working on some possible improvements to the web interface used to search the SCA’s heraldic database, known colloquially as the “O and A,” short for “Ordinary and Armorial.”

(Traditionally, an armorial is a printed listing of armory registrations with their blazons and the names of their holders; mundane armorials typically include all, or all of the notable, registrations within a certain heraldic jurisdiction. An armorial is typically organized alphabetically by the holder’s name; in contrast an ordinary is a specialized index used for looking up armory based on its blazon or appearance, grouping registrations under their primary charges.)

For decades the SCA’s armorial database has been maintained and distributed as a delimited text file, but searching it by hand in this format is inconvenient, and so there are several tools that provide an interface to this data. Continue reading “Interfaces to the Armorial Database”

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.

An Overview of the Heraldic Submission Process

People seeking to register a name or armory with the SCA’s College of Arms are often baffled by the length of time the process takes and the inscrutable jargon used to describe the various stages.

There have been numerous attempts to provide an overview of this process, to which I have now added my own contribution below.

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.

Court Report, Deck The Halls of Valhalla

On the thirteenth day of January, Anno Societatis 52, their excellencies Suuder Saran and Lada Monguligin, Il-Kha’an and Il-Khatun of the Il-Khanate of Østgarđr, did progress to Deck The Halls of Valhalla, held in the Old Stone House in their canton of Brokenbridge, and therein did they hold court.

Firstly his excellency Suuder addressed the populace and thanked them for their attendance in that hall.