Category: Traceable Art

Over the last three months, I’ve added more than two hundred new items to the Traceable Heraldic Art collection, bringing the current total to just over three thousand distinct charges, divisions, treatments, and lines.

Some of the new illustrations were taken from period manuscripts such as the Wappenbuch der Arlberg-Bruderschaft, while others were drawn from modern sources such as the Viking Answer Lady SVG files and the creations of the Pennsic Heralds’ Point art tent team from last summer. Continue reading “Traceable Art Winter Update”

This fall, I have started to separate the largest volume of the collection, with over six hundred illustrations of man-made objects, by moving all of the illustrations related to food and farming into a section of their own, and the same for all of the military-related charges. I intend to continue this process, perhaps splitting out all of the clothing and fabric-related items into a volume of their own.

I hope that this makes it easier for folks who want to page through items related to a particular theme, while still allowing easy lookups of individual charges.

There are a hundred new illustrations that have been added to the collection since this August’s Pennsic. My thanks to the artists who have contributed new charges, including Pennsic Art Tent illustrators Bahja al-Azraq, Kryss Kostarev, and Li Xia, among others. Continue reading “New Fall Illustrations”

This was the third year of service for the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art at Pennsic, and once again the collection got a workout in the art tent behind Heralds’ Point.

My thanks to Muirenn ingen Dunadaig for printing all of the pages that have been added over the last year (over five hundred) and getting them added to the binders, and to everyone who provided feedback to help improve the collection.

I’m especially looking forward to importing some of the new illustrations produced in the art tent — hopefully that will happen over the coming winter. Continue reading “Traceable Art at Pennsic XLVIII”

There’ve been 120 new illustrations added to the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art since February, bringing us to a total of 2,600 items.

This batch includes a depiction of a belladona flower and a number of other images by Nicholas de Estleche, as well as two caps — a bycocket and a cap of maintenance — and some everyday items found in medieval households, including a grater, a funnel, and a hand mirror. Continue reading “April’s Traceable Art”

Over the last month I’ve added another 135 illustrations to the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art.

As with last month, these are drawn from a variety of sources, including some more beasts from Torric inn Björn, some tools and objects from Gustav Völker, and a couple of funky lions from Thomas Wriothesley. Continue reading “Another Round of Traceable Art”

Over the winter holidays I took some time to add another 156 illustrations to the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art.

Many of these are drawn from the Viking Answer Lady’s SVG Images For Heralds, while others come from historical documents including Insignia Florentinorum (Italy, 16th C) and Opus Insignium Armorumque (Slovenia, 17th C), and some have been newly illustrated for this collection. Continue reading “Recent Art Additions”

Over three hundred and fifty images have been added to the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art since the November update, drawn from a variety of sources.

The set I’m most excited about is the first batch of 94 images from Torric inn Björn’s Heraldic Templates, which was published in 1992 and, as far as I know, is the earliest collection of art distributed specifically to facilitate tracing in construction of society armory. My sincere thanks to Lord Torric for granting permission for these images to be re-published here.

This booklet offers far more potential than its 56-page size would suggest, because it contains elements which can be recombined in multiple ways; for example, it contains a few illustrations of deer in various postures as well as examples of various types of antlers that can be mixed and matched together to create stags, elk, and reindeer in those positions. Þórý Veðardóttir has helpfully worked through a number of these combinations, ringing the changes on postures of dragons, wyverns, cockatrices and basilisks. We’ve got dozens more  of these images still to process, and I look forward to getting them all online in the months ahead.

Another source of new images in this last round has been John Guillim’s 1611 A Display of Heraldry. While its engraved style with extensive shading contrasts with the pen-and-ink outline style used in most society submissions, the images are useful patterns for tracing that (with a bit bit of adaptation) can be used digitally as well, and I enjoy seeing material that dates from so close to our period of study. I’m particularly fond of his Dr. Seuess-ish eel and turkey.

I’m also continuing to work through the images from the 2007 Pennsic Traceable Art book, which yields over a dozen heraldic dog postures newly added to the collection this month, and from the Viking Answer Lady’s SVG Images For Heralds collection, which helped fill out some more of the many varieties of heraldic crosses.

The further I get into this, the more I realize how much remains to be done, so I’m looking forward to a productive new year as the collection continues to grow.

I needed some time off after the big push to get the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art into shape for Pennsic, but have made a bit of continuing progress on it this autumn.

We’re now up over 950 pages of traceable illustrations, and should blow past a thousand pages before the end of the year. (It’s amusing to note that at the start of the year I thought a thousand pages was likely to be the end point of the project — at the current rate, we could plausibly reach two thousand somewhere in the next couple of years.)

I’m also working on a new printable “catalog” layout that allows people to easily scan through design elements at a consultation table — it packs most of the tinctures, divisions, and charges into a compact format that’s a bit over fifty pages rather than a thousand.

The catalog layout still needs some cleaning up around the edges — I’m using a Perl script to rearrange the SVGs and metadata from the original document into a series of web pages which are then converted to PDFs via JavaScript and Chrome, which seems kind of jury-rigged but so far seems to mostly work.