Month: December 2017

An end! We have an end of sorts!

Part Eighteen brings us to the end of the first draft postings of all 160-something devices in this Field Only Armoury Project I decided would be an amusing distraction and exploration of the SCA’s registered devices sometime back in early September.

This last-for-now batch is mostly quarterly, as expected given the alphabetical by blazon sort I’ve used, but includes a couple of nice vert-field devices right at the end. This includes one of the few canting arms in this project, Wade Greenwall’s splendid green wall device, “Vert masoned Or” on the right of the middle row there.

Canting, for those unfamiliar, is punning or wordplay on a person’s name or a placename expressed in heraldry. The Swiss city of Bern uses a bear in their heraldry, for example. It’s harder in armory like I’ve been studying where there’s no central ordinary like a bear, but a few years ago in Atenveldt the good gentle Greenwall proved you can do it with field-primary heraldry too! Heralds, the ancient and terrible joke goes, do not pun. They cant.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to anyone who’s followed along this far, especially the awesome folks in the Facebook “Baby Heralds of the SCA” group who’ve provided so much great feedback and encouragement for this lunatic project. I’ll be working on updates and tweaks over the holidays and will be back in 2018 to finish it off with, hopefully, some style and some useful posters and such to share with the larger SCA heraldic community.

Part the Seventeenth. The end is nigh!

It would have been upon us slightly faster if I was more organized about generating the batch images and writing posts, but real life, work, and sleep have a bad habit of cutting into hobby time, you know?

Anyway. Heraldry, field only variety. Today is all quarterly and variations on that theme.

Given the number of us in the SCA who play Norse (yes, me too…) I’m really surprised not to see more “quarterly arrondi” devices like Sven Forlorad’s “Quarterly arrondi sable and Or” in the top left corner there. It’s a stereotypically Norse design, would look great on a round shield, and his device is the single solitary field-only example of the type somehow.

Edmund Godric Scrymgeour’s “Quarterly azure and argent all mailly counterchanged” next to it was the device that finally forced me to sit down and draw an acceptable maily design in Inkscape, after at least five previous attempts all looked too crowded at any sort of distance.

In the “small neat details” category, I like the little square twist right at the centre of Anne Tanzer’s 1973 “Quarterly dancetty of five per fess and six per pale azure and Or” where the two dancetty lines intersect. (leftmost in the middle row)

One last one in a day or so, then there’s going to be a bit of a pause over Christmas/New Years while I fix errors, change the layout around, and get ready to do a few different and hopefully interesting things with this big block of armoury I’ve created over the last few months!

Part the Sixteenth! Just two more after this and the entire (first draft!) run of this lunatic project is finally finished…

We’re getting well toward the end of the alphabet now (we’re sorted alphabetically by blazon for this project, remember) with the last of the per saltire devices, a brief excursion into pily bendy, and ending with another reappearance of scaly.

Lots of good stuff in this batch, too. Being a fan of the heraldic furs Katharine Devereaux’s top left device, “Per saltire erminois and pean” is a personal favourite, but I also like the entire run of “pily bendy/pily bendy sinister” devices.

Just sixteen more devices to show you before this first draft pass is complete!

Part Fifteen! The end of this long march is in sight, as there will indeed be eighteen parts!

So what’s in today’s installment? Per pall and per saltire is where we’re at, with (somewhat surprisingly for this project) only a single device using stacked field divisions, Josse Gößler’s hazard striped “Per pall inverted sable, argent, and chevronelly gules and argent” up in the middle of the top row.

This batch also includes the seniormost herald in my home kingdom of An Tir, Oddr Þiálfason, current Black Lion Principal Herald of the An Tir College of Heralds. That’s his “Per saltire arrondi vert and Or” in the lower left corner, with one of several blanket permission to conflict (PtC)’s in this batch that help keep the very Norse-looking per saltire arrondi design space slightly more open for other Norse-influenced SCA participants.

Which reminds me, must draft up the PtC to go along with my own device submission, which I’ll be sending along to Oddr and his staff sometime over the Christmas holidays!