Tag: heraldry

Part Eleven is all per fess, all the time, including a bunch of really cool and rarely seen lines of division.

Alys de Wilton’s “Per fess ermine and sable” is an elegant classic, and the only device in this batch with a plain line of division. We’re off into complex lines for the entire rest of this batch after that, including my personal favourite, Mariken van Oostbroeck’s “Per fess trefly-countertrefly azure and gules” in the middle of the bottom row.

“Per fess indented flory at the points” shows up twice, and although indented usually has a lot more points than just three, adding the extra complexity of the “flory at the points” forces you to simplify so as not to turn the middle of the device into a messy blur from any distance. Heraldry should always be clear and recognizable, after all!

Hey, we’re into the double digits, and firmly into the second half of this pass through my project to emblazon all of the Field Only devices in the Society’s Ordinary & Armorial.

Today we move from “per chevron” into a long stretch of “per fess” devices.

I only noticed as I was writing this post that Kirstin of Hoschar’s unique device had it’s blazon text truncated off the right edge of the image. The full blazon reads, “Per fess embattled of three battles sevenfold grady, Or and sable.” Translated, that means “three battlements composed of seven steps each” and gives you the fascinating step pyramid line of division.

I think Fiora Vespucci’s elegant “Per chevron ploye flory at the point gules and argent” is my personal favourite of this batch (top left), although my liking for the heraldic furs puts Robert Fitzmorgan’s “Per fess embattled pean and Or masoned sable” a close second down in the bottom left.

I’m not entirely happy with my version of masoned, this is my second or third attempt at drawing it and it’s still not as “big, bold, and butch” as I feel it should be. I think I’ll be throwing all the masoned devices back onto the “to be redrawn” pile before I declare this project entirely finished.

On through the per fess devices in Part Eleven soon!

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.