Month: November 2017

Being the ninth part (of many!) of my project to emblazon all the Field Only devices in the SCA’s Ordinary & Armorial as of October 2017.

After pausing the project to re-do the colour palette and make some behind-the-scenes changes, I resumed with Part Eight a little while ago, and have also finished emblazoning all 161 devices on my spreadsheet!

I’ll try and crank out the images to post here from the giant Inkscape SVG file and get one Part posted every couple of days until we hit the end. As I’ve also gone back and corrected and re-coloured all the devices from Parts One through Seven, I’m probably going to republish the whole collection in a slightly different format after the first pass is done. I’ll do any corrections found, then probably reformat to get 12 devices per page and put out a multi-page PDF version of the whole project all at once. This would have the advantage of being suitable for printing, if anyone wishes to do so!

Anyway, on to Part the Ninth, gentles.

Part Nine takes us out of per bend/per bend sinister territory and into the per chevron blazons. Gules and Or being a personal favourite heraldic colour combo I have to admit a liking for Irina Francesca degli Schiavoni’s “Per bend sinister urdy Or and gules” in the top left corner, as well as the two very elegant per chevron plus something else combinations in the bottom row, Isabel Chamberlaine’s “Per chevron gules and barry wavy argent and azure” and Geoffrey FitzDavid’s “Per chevron gules and chevronelly Or and sable”. The chevronelly could stand perhaps to be slightly narrower and slightly more of them, but it’s still a really elegant combination of field divisions.

On to Part Ten in a couple of days! It looks like it will take eighteen pages at nine devices per page to get through this first pass, so we’re just over the halfway point now… and then I’ll see about the field only badges, I guess, as well as the final corrected versions of these devices I mentioned above.

After a bit of a delay, Part Eight is here!

I spent a bit of project time reorganizing things behind the scenes, correcting some of the errors from the first seven pages released, and adjusted the colour palette I was using for good measure.

This section is all variations on the theme of “per bend sinister”! I particularly like the two per bend and checky combinations, top left and top right, Marcus Eisenwald’s “Per bend sinister checky gules and argent and ermine” and the thematically similar “Per bend sinister ermine and checky gules and Or” of Isabella Evangelista.

That brings me to something else I did while modifying the palette! I decided that with so many awesome versions of ermine spot available in the Viking Answer Lady’s SVG Graphics for Heralds collection I was going to do a different ermine spot for each device that needed them, purely for the heck of it. You can see five of them on this page alone.

More soon! I’m very close to finishing all of the initial batch of devices in this project, so I’ll start posting them regularly while I work on the few dozen badges on the list and contemplate whether to do the real world devices/badges/flags as well just for the heck of it.

Feedback appreciated on the new colour scheme, as well as any errors you spot, as always.

Part Seven, devices fifty-eight through sixty six of one hundred and sixty five! Progress is taking place, and I’m actually well ahead of that in actual emblazoning as I didn’t start posting this project here until I was at these devices finally being published today, so I have some lead time in case of delays.

Today is all about variations on the theme of “per bend”. We’ve got the always-popular “per bend rayonny”, including Cathyn Fitzgerald’s striking black and red “Per bend rayonny gules and sable” device.

This was also the stretch of this project where I changed how I show ermine, on advice from several people in the Facebook Baby Heralds of the SCA group. Top left we have Abel Parnell Le Guide’s excellent “Per bend pean and erminois” (I unashamedly love this tincture combination…) and Thomas of Waverly’s “Per bend potenty vert and ermine”, featuring the excellent and under-used potenty line, both in the previous style with lots of smaller ermine spots.

Rightmost on the second line we have the first appearance of my modified ermine emblazoning, with fewer much larger ermine spots in Ginevra Maddalena di Tomaso Volpe’s “Per bend sinister argent ermined vert and purpure.” Splendid name and nice arms, although I’m not sure if the name is Italian or Spanish, to be honest.

(Skip all of the following unless you’re into deeply geeky Society-specific rules of heraldry. Nice pictures of devices will return soon!)

The bottom row also nicely illustrates one of the interesting things about field-only armoury under the SCA’s heraldic rules. Normally a device has to have two minor (Distinct Changes/DCs) or one major (Substantial Change/SC) change from an existing device to be registerable by Laurel Sovereign of Arms. A change in line of division is not normally considered an SC, just a DC.

That said, how can Peter Trevor’s “Per bend sinister bevilled azure and argent” (bottom right) have been allowed in October 2003 when Sabine Berard’s awesomely simple “Per bend sinister azure and argent” had just been registered in May 2002?

Field-primary armoury runs under slightly different rules than armoury with an actual primary charge, that’s how.

SENA A5F says, in part: F. Standards for Difference through a Single Substantial Change of Field for Field-Primary Armory: This rule applies only to field-primary armory; that is, armory which has no primary charge group, including armory with peripheral ordinaries, whether they are charged or uncharged. Field-primary armory is discussed further in Appendix I. A new field-primary submission does not conflict with a piece of protected field-primary armory if the two fields have a substantially different partition or tincture as defined below.

…and then way down at the bottom of SENA Appendix M there’s categories of different lines of partition. Bevilled is an entirely distinct category, so our two otherwise similar sets of armoury are clear and OK.

So leaving a primary charge or ordinary off your device gets you some breaks when conflict-checking that you wouldn’t ordinarily get. Ain’t that awesome?

(I’m reasonably certain that all of the preceeding discussion of SENA and the application thereof is accurate and sensible, but this is all new to me too so it might be gibberish. If it is gibberish, please do correct me below and I’ll update or remove gibberish as required!)

Minor delay since Part Five due to my home computer’s hard drive starting to do itself in! I haven’t lost any files, thankfully, and I was also backing up this particular project’s files on Google Drive, but most of the recent long weekend was lost to tech support nonsense and troubleshooting. Now I just have to wait for the replacement hard drive to arrive… and then reinstall my OS on it… then transfer all my files from the old failing hard drive before it does, in fact, completely fail… computers are fun.

Anyway, on to heraldry!

Part six finishes up the paly fields, pauses briefly at a pair of party of six devices, then starts the long trek through the per bend devices!

My hands-down favourite in this batch is Alexandra Gangefeyr’s “Per bend flory counterflory Or and sable” in the middle of the bottom row. Black and gold is always a good colour combination and the flory counterflory line (alternating fleur-de-lise, basically) is a very elegant one.

Reta de Flintbeke’s “Per bend embowed counter-embowed Or and azure, pale two leaves issueant from the line of division counterchanged.” (rightmost in the middle row) might win a prize for the longest blazon text in this project, and it might also win a spot on my list of devices I am going to re-do because I’m still not happy with the look of the two leaves in the middle.

Sigeric of Ravenstone’s “Per bend azure and bendy sinister argent and azure” (leftmost middle row) tripped me up when I first looked at it because it’s the first device on my long list that has different field treatments on each side of the major line of division (the per bend line). Mentally adding a bit of punctuation can help decipher blazons like this: “Per bend, azure, and bendy sinister argent and azure.” is messier than it needs to be for a proper blazon but helps parse out the design – pure blue against the top edge of the shield, diagonal stripes of blue and silver (white) only below the per bend line on the lower left half.