When you should be painting, make heraldry.

Hi All,

Well, what with Track, practicing ropedart, and "Family" time in front of the TV I didn't get much of anything painted yesterday.

I did manage to noodle around on the Inkwell Ideas Coat of Arms creator to make the heraldry for those Knights of the Realm though.

It took me a fair amount of noodling around and my recollection of heraldic terms made it a little more trial and error, but I got something that seems to work. These are more or less in the order I've ranked them up and will paint them.

No names yet. The Buck's head is really front view but the software didn't have that. You can add your own vectors, but I just wanted these to be quick and dirty. The colors of the creatures are set by the colors of the decals I have. For the displayed eagle I thought white and blue would contrast well with the red eagle. The quartered Red and Blue is for the Viscomte. I used the seated lion because I didn't see the rampant lion. The blue lion is because I have two Lion shields. This guys head dress is some kind of bat winged almost lion thing, the first departure from the matchy, matchy thing I've done with the first three. Lastly the bull. This one was also supposed to be just the head, head on. Again, just making these quick and dirty. To me, although very simple, the black bull on plain white seems more visually appealing. Unfortunately I do not have a bull head dress so he will have the Dragon. I'll make up some reason why. Now I just have to think of what color to make it. Maybe just keep with black.

It's the Martin Luther King Jr holiday today, so no work for me, but a lot of errands to run. Hope you have a productive day.

Thanks for looking.

Heraldry using Inkwell Ideas COA

Hi All,

Sorry to be so quiet. The track season is in full swing and we had another meet yesterday. Hope everyone had a Happy Easter today, but I'm a tad worn out. As one other parent put it, "I'm exhausted and I didn't even do anything."

Anyway, I have my Talomir Tales battle to fight and a game of Knight's Quest to play. While I was cooking dinner tonight I decided to make some shield designs for the heraldry of Messrs Chicken and Waffles using Inkwell Ideas Coat of Arms creator.

Very similar to what I was creating myself with GIMP but much faster with the Java program. Good fun and easy to use.

Heraldry on a rainy day

Well, I'm on a short trip with my Mom and kids to sight see around Northern Arizona. We had plans to see Meteor Crater, Walnut Canyon, Sunset Crater and Wupatki National monument.

The only problem is my daughter came down with something. So my mom son and some teenage cousins are out while we sit in the hotel watching cartoon network and fiddling around with Talomir Heraldry.

I hope they aren't getting too wet as it is pouring rain outside the hotel right now.

On to the heraldry.

I have to fight out a battle between two armies I do not have, so I was going to make paper counters for Stygustan (Egyptian) and Tropilium (Imperial Roman). So of course I need something to differentiate the counters.

The scarab is from Openclipart.org by johnny automatic. I just colored in the wings. The Faces I had from Free Heraldry Clipart and then I added the Tau Rho (for Tropilium) as a riff off of the Chi Rho of late Roman iconography. Of course there is also a Tau Rho christian symbol but none of them worked for me. The font is Atene from Dafont.

Next Tropilium had a bunch of mercenaries and conquered nation units. For the North Tropilium unit I just kept the same design and noted it in the name and stats of the unit. They also had Riata Warriors and Hykar Cavalry fighting for them. So first we need to come up with heraldry for those nations.

Again fairly simple, three colors for the Savage head for Riata. For Hykar I wanted Centaurs I don't really like the graphic, but it was quick. To differentiate mercenaries I added a sinister bend.

At first I had put the bend on top, but that looked crappy. I also noticed when making the images for this post that I'd missed coloring a sliver on the left. Oops.

Finally Tropilium also has the Black Company in its employ. Since the Black and White Companies are rivals so I thought that they should be a mirror of each other. Since John Hawkwood was the commander of the actual white company I used his arms and made both.

So that is what I've been doing over the last few days. The units for the Stygustan army are printed out and read to cut from 110lb. cardstock. I'll have to wait until tomorrow to print out the Tropilium army.

Id like to welcome new followers to the blog as well. I've followed quite a few blogs of late and they have been kind enough to reciprocate.

DeanM of WAB Corner painting up and fielding some beautiful WHFB armies. Even his quick paintjobs look really sharp.

John of Band of Wargame Brothers gorgeous looking 28mm figures and terrain. I need to have more of a look around this one.

Edwin King whom I'm guessing writes Thoughts of a depressive diplomatist. You friend profile doesn't have a link and you don't appear to be named on the blog itself. But a quirky and interesting blog none the less.

Chris Stoeson another person with no blog link. If you have a blog please let me know and I'll post a link. of Wargames Odds and Ends, looks like a good blog with scenarios for sale. Again I'll have to investigate further.

Crazy Joe or Gary as he is now calling himself ;) writes Happy Valley another unique blog with opinions to spare. It was actually his review of Tony Harwood's book that helped it achieve critical mass and push me to buy it.

laughingferret of Laughing Ferret Lab who wrote a very insightful post about that lame article bashing wargamers in the telegraph.

That's all for now.

Paper Counter v2.0

Hi All,

  Well since time change + insomnia = time to do projects, I've finished the counters v 2.0 using the new heraldry.

  I'm going to have some breakfast and then clear off the table and bang this one out. Could be short with the  Cavalry heavy Capalan Army.

PS - I've been informed that I need to assist with last minute grocery shopping, so it may take a little while longer.

Fantasy Heraldry update

Just a quick update. I knocked out the Capalan and Tereken stuff today.

Resta, Cosimo, Bertolli, Bellisima and Orso of Capalan followed by Tereken.

I went to town coloring the last three, I thought it added interest. Not sure I'm totally happy with the base for the Capalan shield, but it will do the job for now.

I'll get on a tutorial for how I did this in a day or two. We are gearing up for the holidays and i can only get away with so much time away from those tasks.

I've also got another project now, since we are doing a Joust tournament I need to come up with a feeder competition to learn the game and choose my champion. Ruarigh had suggested that I do Saxon knights in the Arthurian tradition so my Knight will be:

1. Sir Bedevere the Wise
2. Sir Lancelot the Brave
3. Sir Robin the Not quite so brave as Sir Lancelot
4. Sir Galahad the Pure
5. Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe (The Black Knight)
6. Sir Not Appearing in this Film
7. The Knight who says Ni
8. Sir Reynard of Caerbannog (his emblem is the Rabbit)

Should be fun.

Still plowing through fluff for the Cthulhu game and trying to shoe horn Elder Sign stats into THW.

Fantasy Heraldry pt 3 - Tracing gifs tutorial

Hi All,

  As you can see I am starting to suffer from ooh shinitis. So to keep on track here is how you convert those pesky gif files into lovely SVG and PNG formats using Inkscape.

First, if you haven't already done so, download the latest version of Inkscape from here. I'm using 0.48 and it looks like I'm a little behind. As always this should be FREE. Never pay anyone for Inkscape.

Step 1: Open your copy of Inscape.

Open Inkscape

Step 2: Open your desired gif image it will pop up asking you to link or embed, choose embed.

You now opened gif image.

Step 3: Make sure the image is selected by mouse clicking on it. You will see the little black arrows.

Arrows show that it has been selected

Step 4: Go to the Path dialog and select Trace Bitmap.

 This window will pop up. I hit update in the picture, but all it did was give me the white rectangle in the preview. I just left all the values at their defaults and hit okay.

It will be hard to tell, the black lines may look thicker.

Step 5: Drag the tracing off of the gif. It should be on top so you can select it with the mouse and then drag it where you like. It is possible that you could just hit delete at this point, since your original bitmap should still be selected. I didn't do that just to give myself visual proof of the two different layers.

Trace on the left, original on the right.

 Step 5a: I now have to go back and select the gif image again.

Step 6: Delete the gif. We don't need it any more.

Step 7: Move our tracing back into the image area.

Final step is to "Save As". It will default to SVG you can select PNG or whatever you'd like. You now have a clean scalable image to use in your heraldry projects.

As always, let me know if you have any questions or if you need me to do a video to help you understand the process more readily.

Cheers.

I've also just noticed that I've passed 15,000 views and this is my 151st post. Since I wasn't paying attention I'll have to figure out something to do for 20,000 views and my 200th post. 

Party over here - more heraldry sketching

Okay so I phoned it in the other day with the heraldry for Ekra. I mean come on, a yellow Fleur-de-lis on a blue field, lame!

So here is something a little better.

A little rough, but you get the idea.

The re-sizing of the gifs was quick and dirty so they are quite bad, but you get the idea. The shield is Party Sinister. Three FdL yellow on blue, Dolphin Hauriant Red on white.

That seems a tad more interesting. Wikimedia Commons category Coats of Arms by Blazon reminded me of the Party division of the shield and is a good resource if you have a vague idea and some notion of the terminology.

I also stumbled upon a link from TMP when I did a search for heraldry. It is Free Heraldry Clipart which appears to be where I got all of my stuff from. As with so many things I collect from the internet it is eventually lost in the sands of time as to where I actually found it. A great resource and even more stuff than I have on hand at present. They're all gifs, but I'll be showing you my method of tracing to turn them into beautiful vector graphics or png format.

That's all for now.

Fantasy Heraldry pt. 2 - Specific design

Now we move on to the Fantasy Heraldry specific for the project I have in mind. Namely the invasion of Capalan by Tereken in the ongoing RRtK campaign over at Talomir Tales. So, just in case you're new to Talomir, Tereken are essentially Anglo-Saxons and Capalan are Italian city states around the 15th century.

As such I have to come up with one symbol for Tereken and then as many as five, one for each original province, for Capalan. Capalan also has Brethren Mercenaries so I'll have to make a Symbol for them. Tereken seems pretty straight forward. I've already identified the colors Green and Yellow and some kind of Dragon.

Dragon or Wyvern?

Capalan...hmm. Okay we know we want some kind of Italian wars theme. Looking here (particularly Mazzacane and Palma) gave me the idea to try a base scheme to tie them together with different emblems added to differentiate. So we have Resta, who is the leader, so I'm thinking skeleton or bones since google translate tells me Resta means remains. Cosimo was one of the Medici's so I will use the six circle configuration similar to that shown here. Bertolli definitely gets an olive branch if not an outright lift of the Olive Oil companies logo, probably not since that is a bad thing to do. But I'll riff off of it. Bellissima, I had thought of making her a proxy for princess peach, but then I saw a Mermaid in my collection so I think I'll go with that. And lastly Orso, the Bear. Seems like he should have a bear on his heraldry. The only question is what kind? Rampant? I wonder if there is a sleeping bear, I'll have to investigate. As far as color scheme goes I'll have to ask Ruarigh what the hex number or name is for the border highlight on his map. It appears to be some shade of violet. Could be a problem as I'm not sure what colors complement that.

From Wikimedia Commons

The bits and pieces for Capalan

Ruarigh told me what the hex # for the CC3 color was. I'm still not sure what color to pair with the purple, I'm leaning towards yellow.

Lastly the Brethren. From the RRtK rule book we read that "The Brethren have numerous holdings in Talomir called Red Castles and are found in Ekra, Altengard and Treyine."(RRtK, p66) Now as we know from reading Talomir Tales, Ekra and the Brethren have been defeated and absorbed by Treyine. So the only independent source of Brethren left is in Altengard. That being said one could make a case for the Treyine and Ekran branches hiring out as mercenaries since they have been disbanded, and their wealth reverted to the crown, by Treyine. My original thoughts were to have a central theme for the brethren, with a device to differentiate the three nations of origin. Since Ruarigh gave them the Teutonic black cross already I may stick with that, however red is the brethrens color of choice being devotees of the Red Sun. I think a cross, with a red sun in the upper left quadrant and then a device in the middle for the country. This of course may mean that I now need to make them for Ekra, Altengard and Treyine. Oh bother.

Altengard, Ekra, Treyine and a non aligned Brethren

So I did this after more correspondence with Raurigh and Javier. Okay so I phoned in Ekra, but these are all just concept drawings.

Also thanks to Iain from the THW Yahoo group for adding a link to the meaning of Heraldry symbols, aptly named Symbolism of Heraldry. I'm not sure I like it as much as at least one of the others I found, but the information looks good. Perhaps I'll do a comparison of these symbolism sites in another post.

Also as a postscript (since it's taken me days to work out this silly post) to more links of use. Color Wiki where I searched for hex codes for these oddball colors (yes I mean you Murrey).

And looking for Plantagenet herldry I stumbled upon the gold mine that is Early Blazon.

Enjoy and if you have constructive feedback I'd love to hear it.

Fantasy Heraldry - one man's approach

When playing a fantasy campaign I like to make little heraldic icons for each nation/player. Sometimes I just go with something stock other times I try to create something new. The beauty of fantasy heraldry is that you aren't bound by convention. What follows is a walk through (or ramble) of my process and some resources I have found along the way.

I will also say that when I say heraldry I am conflating it with banners for wargaming purposes. So you want to make a banner/ heraldic symbol? What better way than to reference actual symbols. My first stop is usually Wikimedia Commons, search term Heraldry. Heraldry.ws is another good resource. For banners I like Warflag, Fanaticus, Grimsby Wargamers Society,and of course Dansk Figursspilsforening. I could go on but here are the basics.

So I now have culled through a bunch of stuff and have plenty of ideas of real or speculative designs. Next I need to think about the back ground of my Lord or nation and start throwing around the various bits that make up a heraldic device. One thing I found in researching this article is something I don't recall encountering before. There are a few sites that describe the individual meaning of the various parts of a coat of arms. The aptly named Heraldry Symbols and The Meaning Behind the Symbols - Fleur-de-lis Designs. So now I can also think about what I want to say about the individual that this CoA represents.

My method usually involves a rough sketch with colored pencils. (Please forgive my drawing, I'm a terrible artist.)

These were for my Linlandia map project.

So the since this was originally based off of a Mighty Empires campaign I was heavily influenced by Warhammer. So the Empire proxy uses the black eagle on a yellow field. The Bretonia proxy uses a yellow fleur-de-lis on a blue field. Orcs have lots of skulls, Chaos some kind of Chaos symbol. For the dwarves you need some kind of blacksmith reference and a rune, for the elves something suitably elven.

My method was to take some heraldic gifs I found out on the interwebs and use inkskape to trace them and convert them to vector images. I think I mostly made pngs because my svg file associations were weird. So by way of example, I came up with this for one of the Chaos coastal cities. I assembled the parts in GIMP, although I could have continued with Inkscape.

I kept it clear for the project

So as you can see it is chaosy with a ship to show it's status as a port. Maybe they are pirates? I don't know.

The final product made to look hand painted.

So as you can see I basically re-created the elements from my sketches using clip art. I think in this case I already had the clip art and just finagled it around.

Does this differ much from your workflow? Anyhow in the next installment I will show how I am working out  using these methods for the Talomir Tales campaign.