i HAVE to know how you went about designing the heraldic devices on the flags in the sculpture chocodile just shared. Do the symbols have meaning?
Hell yeah, here comes the flood! This will be a bit of a rambly crash-course in my likely slightly inaccurate remembering of heraldic facts (and largely focused on English heraldic rules, as that is what most online resources focus on), so bear with me, haha.
Also going to try my hand at writing blazons for them, just for practice. :P
So, for me, the challenge in designing something like this is that I wanted to designs to be evocative of the character themself, but coat of arms are also passed down from the ancestor that was originally granted it through the family line, so they should also represent the character's family as a whole.
Sable, in chief an estoile gules, in fess an open hand argent between two estoiles of the second.
Hyden comes from an ambitious magical family, so I wanted something that alluded to both the concepts of "mystical" and "evil." Red and black is a bit of a cliché way to do it, but it's effective, no?
Hyden also has a star motif in his family; Hyden's first name, Arcturus, is the name of a star! Stars are also something that seem pretty mystical, right? I wanted to incorporate those in his coat of arms, so on they go.
I went through other charges at first, including a rabbit (self-explanatory) and mountains (Hyden's family comes from a mountainous region), but Chocodile liked the version with the hand best. The hand was meant to represent both the using of magic (often channeled through the hands), and due to the positioning of the stars, appears as though it is reaching up to grab the stars, relating to his (and his family's) ambitious and power-hungry nature.
I also had a version with white stars that followed the rule of tincture properly (short version of the rule of tincture: only white and gold can be put on top of any other color), but Chocodile preferred the version with red stars, so red stars it is! It works, too, because the star Arcturus, which Hyden and many of his ancestors were named after, is a red giant star.
Quarterly; first and fouth, Gules semy of flames Or, a sun Or charged with an eye palewise irised gules and pupiled Or; second and third, Argent semy of roses gules thorned and seeded Or.
No idea if THAT blazon is correct, this one's a bit funky.
Ambroys was a challenge because he comes from two important families, but he's a disappointment not much like either of his parents.
He also has the most complex coat of arms of the bunch because I wanted to have him quartering both his parents arms, since being the descendent of two powerful lineages is important to his character. When a nobleman was descended from two parents who were able to pass down coats of arms, the son could quarter them like this to preserve his mother's arms, which, due to rules of inheritance focusing on male lineage, would otherwise be lost.
The coat of arms featuring roses is the one belonging to his father. Admittedly, I cheated a bit here because I just really wanted roses on Ambroys' heraldic device since I associate them so strongly with him. BUT the area where his father's family comes from is a place known for farmland, natural beauty, and richness. Thus, I thought a field of flowers would suit that rather well.
The other coat of arms belongs to his mother. While she isn't a noble because she's not part of the mortal system, she does have a sigil that represents her (the sun and eye motif), and I figured anyone descended from a Celestial would be so important they'd have a right to arms. Thus, her sigil is incorporated into the coat of arms representing her, in addition to a field of flames and red. His mother was a somewhat warlike, conquering entity, thus a field of blood and the fire she would leave behind felt like an appropriate backdrop for her symbol.
Ordinarily, the father's arms would go in the dexter position (dexter is right on a shield, or our left), as dexter is a place of prominence over sinister (shield's left, our right). However, I decided to put his mother's arms there instead, as she was a Celestial while his father was a mortal, which I imagined would take prominence on the hierarchy scale over the fact that one's his mommy and one's his daddy.
Ermines, on a chief argent, three gouttes de sang.
I had already designed the coat of arms for Theo's family some time ago. Even before I furrified them, I associated his mother and her family with ermines. Ermine fur was used in the cloaks of royalty and nobility since way back, and they live in cold climates. Their association with the elite and coldness, as well as their deceptively vicious predation of animals much larger than they are (including... rats) made them well-suited to be a symbol of Theo's hoity-toity, standoffish, and frankly rather nasty family.
Thus I used ermine fur as the field of the coat of arms. Ermine fur is often used in heraldic devices, for the association with nobility I mentioned before! That's what those weird three-spot things are - a representation of the spots of color on an ermine-fur cloak.
But ermine fur is represented as white with black spots, like the real thing. There is, however, another version of ermine fur sometimes used in heraldry called "counter-ermine" or "ermines," which is black with white spots, like what's going on there!
I used counter-ermine partly just for aesthetics - I wanted to have the drops of blood, and to follow the rules of tincture, needed to put them on white (or gold, but yellow doesn't suit him), and the black fur contrasted with that better.
But there's also another reason. An old medieval myth is that ermines are very vain creatures, who would rather give themselves up to hunters than risk being injured and having blood dirty their pure white coats. A black ermine wouldn't have to worry about that, though. So the black ermine fur represents that they are just as haughty and vain as a regular ermine, but also willing to get their hands (or fur) dirty.
The drops of blood (gouttes de sang) represent both the North's history in that they earned their nobility through war and bloodshed, and also are just very fixated on their bloodline and the concept of family loyalty. The blood drops also tie into the myth about ermines that I mentioned before.
There is also YET MORE BLOOD in the full achievement (a coat of arms that also shows all the other nonsense I labeled here) I designed for them, which incorporates ermines as supporters, but also a heraldic pelican as the crest. The medieval myth behind pelicans was that the mothers would pierce their own skin to feed their offspring their own blood. Very goth, and also tying into family loyalty yet again. You might notice that the motto of the Norths involves blood, again. There's a theme going on here, is what I'm saying.
(also the Latin is wrong in the motto, I seem to mess up the grammar in a new way each time I attempt it, BUT DISREGARD THAT)
I'd like to design full achievements for Hyden and Ambroys as well, some day! But I think that's enough of my babbling for now.
Thanks for reading my essay, I hope you found it at least a bit interesting, haha. xP
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Could you help me figure out the blazon for my coat of arms? The lingo really makes my head spin. So far, all I've come up with is "purpure, hummingbird sinister argent, wings displayed and elevated" but I'm pretty sure that's incorrect.
i feel like this should be
Purpure, a hummingbird volant to sinister, wings displayed Argent
as in, it's a hummingbird in flight, to the sinister of the shield, and it has its wings displayed like a heraldic eagle usually would
the nomenclature for the attitude of wings in heraldry is apparently very confusing due to a lot of differences in style, and as a result of very pedantic heralds trying to describe all those variations over the ages, so it's only really natural that this confused you, too
the blazon took ME a hot minute to figure out, as a matter of fact
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