April 2020 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

April First Submissions

Every year on the first of April, the heralds of the Society for Creative Anachronism post mock submissions of historical names and armory. You can browse an archive of these letters via the College of Heralds Imaginary.

We generally attempt to adhere to the conventions expected for normal letters of intent, including source citations and armorial rules, but our standards for documentation and style are somewhat relaxed for this humorous purpose.

Below are entries I came up with this year; some of them appeared on the Eastern and Imaginary letters. You’ll notice that a majority of them reflect the East’s theme for the year: desserts. Continue reading “April First Submissions”

Traceable Art Quarantine Update

Over the last forty days or so, I’ve added another two hundred and thirty illustrations to the Traceable Heraldic Art web site.

Thanks to Iago ab Adam and Vémundr Syvursson, both of An Tir, who contributed a number of items to the collection in recent weeks. Master Iago’s adaptations from the Wappenbuch Conrads von Grünenberg are particularly striking, capturing the idiosyncratic character of the original roll while adhering to the clean line-art requirements of our submissions format.

(If you have line-art images you’re willing to share with the community in this way, get in touch! I’d love to have both brand-new charges and new versions of existing charges in different artistic styles.) Continue reading “Traceable Art Quarantine Update”

Using DrawShield for Emblazons

DrawShield is a web service that allows rapid generation of armorial images by either entering a blazon or choosing elements in a point-and-click interface.

It’s an automated system, so the results often aren’t as polished as you can produce by assembling elements yourself, or as unique as the custom work of a talented heraldic artist, but it’s fast and easy, and doesn’t require any tools other than a web browser, so it’s a great option for casual users to try out different possibilities and quickly mock up options for discussion.

Hundreds of charges from the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art have been converted to DrawShield elements, so users of the Traceable collection may recognize some images they encounter there, and DrawShield users can find additional variations of charges here if they wish to further embellish a design they started in that system.

Using GIMP for Emblazons

Jehanette de Provins, Her Majesty the Queen of Northshield, teaches classes on how to create armorial images using GIMP and images from the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art, and recently recorded a session for viewers at home.

GIMP is an open-source software package for pixel-based illustration, in the same vein as Paint and Photoshop. As a Mac user, I find the interface to be a bit clunky, but it’s free, it includes a lot of features, and it runs on a wide variety of operating systems, which makes it a useful tool.

Make sure to turn your volume up to follow the presentation!

Downloading the Livro do Armeiro-Mor

The Livro do Armeiro-Mor (Book of Great Armigers) was painted in Portugal 1506-09 by Jean Du Cros.

As with a number of other period armorials, it has been photographically digitized at high resolution, but the only publicly-available source for these scans is a “click to pan and zoom” web interface operated by the Portuguese Archives Network, which is hard to flip through rapidly, and can’t be accessed when offline at an event. Continue reading “Downloading the Livro do Armeiro-Mor”