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Month: January 2021

A Technique For Internal Detailing On Sable Clip-Art Charges

A recurring challenge when illustrating armory that contains complex sable charges is how to handle the internal detailing that is often provided by fine black lines within a charge of any other color, but which disappears when the charge itself is black.

For example, consider the clip art pomegranate shown below. If we color it entirely black, as shown in image 2, the internal detailing disappears and it’s difficult to identify — is this a roundel wearing a crown? One viable approach is to use a dark gray color for the fill, as in image 3, which allows us to still see some details, but sometimes that’s not enough contrast, and there are contexts in which using shades of gray like this isn’t a viable approach. Continue reading “A Technique For Internal Detailing On Sable Clip-Art Charges”

Conflict Checking Multiply-Divided Field-Only Armory

A couple of years ago, I posted about a technique I picked up from Marie de Blois that allows conflict-checking two- and four-part field-only armory with the O&A complex search form.

It entails running a search for the line type, plus each of the tinctures, and for the tinctures together in reverse order, and the codes for field-only and peripheral-only. Continue reading “Conflict Checking Multiply-Divided Field-Only Armory”

A Survey Of Online Armorial Clip Art Sources

[Editor’s Note: This post draws heavily on an FAQ document produced over the course of several years by multiple users in the SCA Heraldry Unofficial Chat Facebook Group. My thanks to the many people who helped create this resource. — Mathghamhain]

The SCA College of Arms does not have a master list of all registrable charges — we add new ones all the time, and we remove others that are determined to be not something found in period heraldry — but these resources can give you a good idea what’s out there, and provide ready-to-use art for those who can draw original illustrations on their own.

You can incorporate these images directly in your armorial illustrations or use them as references when drawing new original art. Continue reading “A Survey Of Online Armorial Clip Art Sources”

A Survey of Digital Tools for Armory Illustration

[Editor’s Note: This post draws heavily on a FAQ document produced over the course of several years by multiple users in the SCA Heraldry Unofficial Chat Facebook Group. My thanks to the many people who helped create this resource. — Mathghamhain]

There are a wide variety of electronic tools that can be used for illustrating armory at all stages of the process — sketching out ideas, filling out submission forms, and displaying registered designs.

Each of these programs has both strong points and limitations, and a learning curve associated with getting familiar with the user interface and feature set. There are tutorials and documentation available for each of them online, including web pages and YouTube videos. Continue reading “A Survey of Digital Tools for Armory Illustration”

Armorial Catalog for Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin

During the five years in which I’ve been thinking about medieval armory,  I’ve registered four different designs with the College of Arms of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and as I’ve started thinking about further registrations it seemed prudent to pause and take stock of my current inventory. Continue reading “Armorial Catalog for Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin”

Armorial Displays from the Album Amicorum of Jean le Clercq

As described in Wikipedia, an “album amicorum” was a sixteenth-century “book of friendship” with blank pages on which people collected signatures and messages from people they knew, much as modern students might sign each others yearbooks or fans might collect autographs of famous stars.

Many of these include armorial illustrations, some quite elaborate, giving us a glimpse of another way in which heraldic symbols were used during the Renaissance.

The Album Amicorum of Jean le Clercq, a Belgian university student, dates from the tail end of the sixteenth century, combining pages printed in 1564 containing engraved scenes and stanzas of Ovid translated into French, with other pages hand-painted two decades later showing displays of armory. Continue reading “Armorial Displays from the Album Amicorum of Jean le Clercq”