[ANSTHRLD] Device check please

[Tim McDaniel]

On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 PKieferjr at aol.com <heralds at ansteorra.org> wrote:
> In a message dated 9/16/2003 1:10:30 AM Central Daylight Time,
> greywalker1 at yahoo.com writes:
>> Azure and Sable, with an argent chevron proper, two
>> argent sickles, and an argent griffin rampant
>
> How is it divided?  Vertically?  Horizontally? Diagonally up to the
> left?  To the right?  Plain line?  Complex line?  There's a lot of
> possibilities.

What he said.  Please give a more detailed description of the design
in plain English (avoiding heraldic jargon wherever you can), along
the lines of

    The shield is divided in two horizontally.  The top half is blue
    and the bottom half is black.  There's a white chevron -- a ^
    stripe -- point up, so it's partly over the blue part and partly
    over the black part.  In the upper right and left corners are two
    white sickles, and they have their blades upward and their handles
    downward.  On the black part, there's a white griffin: the lion
    part of the body is rampant, facing the viewer's left, and it has
    its wings up (and to the viewer's right).

That's my best guess going by what you wrote so far.

> Also, if you're dividing it "Azure and Sable", then you're going to
> encounter a visual contrast problem.  Those two colors don't show up
> well together.  You can't tell where one color begins and another
> color ends.  That alone will kill your emblazon.

Not *necessarily*.  Granted, blue and black are about the worst pair
of colors for contrast.  But if the line of division is plain and
unobscured, it should pass.  But I don't know whether the chevron
counts for obscuring the line -- depending on how it's drawn, it may
well obscure enough to make it unidentifiable.  (E.g., suppose the
chevron is drawn flat and broad so that only little bits of the
opposite color are visible around it.)

In English armory, whenever there were two colors and one metal, one
of the colors tended to be red.  Red has by far the best visual
contrast versus the other colors.  Would you consider it?

Daniel de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel (home); Reply-To: tmcd at panix.com; work is tmcd at us.ibm.com.