Post by redfish on Feb 15, 2014 6:51:14 GMT
Hi,
I'll be showing some recent vector design I did in this post; please don't hesitate to criticize it or explain to me why what I did wouldn't work well for heraldic design. That's primarily the reason I'm making this post; I want to check with the experts here and see whether I'm going down the right track. There was some work involved for me, but it wasn't that bad; I can easily change things or change course to something else. Most of the time I spent was researching things on the web, not drawing.
I got interested in the idea of designing tree vectors after enderandrew's request for help; he had the design with the lion and oak tree. The only oak tree vectors I found on the web were either stylized as large branches, so, while very nice, didn't exactly match the look of the design he asked for, or had borders around all of the parts, while I wanted to try to make a borderless, stencil-like design. My first attempt was to group the leaves together like in the bordered design, and then cut out the borders from the base image. This didn't end up looking to well, especially at a distance, because it started to look really busy when it was shrunk.
But, I wanted to continue to experiment down these lines... to see if I could make a full oak design that would both look distinct on a coat of arms and work as a stencil. The trees that just had large branches looked nice on a coat of arms, but I wanted to try something different.
So, I first drew a bare tree, and the idea was to wind the leaves around the branches. An image of the bare tree, in two versions --
With the leaves put in, it ended up looking good, but not necessarily good for a charge. Zooming out, the I made the leaves a little two small. I did some research on the web to see if there were any standards for trees in heraldry, and eventually came across a page on the SCA's heraldry website, where, according to their rules, trees would largely be distinguishable by their shape, with the oak listed as a rounded shape, as is commonly seen, though not always, on crests,
I looked a bit around for examples and counter-examples, and I found a lot of roundish shaped oaks in the Wikipedia page for "Oaks in heraldry", as well as other shapes, but a particular round shape I found was pretty pleasing, and even though most oak trees probably aren't round, it looked like something that would be really distinct as an oak tree from a distance.
That you would have difficulty translating to stencil form, but I wanted to model my tree shape after it. After seeing some crests with trees where the leaves weren't always the same exact shape as each other, I decide to do something similar in order to help both make the tree look a little more organic, and help form the shape. The first version I did looked good, but I was concerned that it might not be distinguishable from other trees at a distance, per the leaves, so I made a version with larger leaves, which give it a more oakish quality,
I don't know that the pattern of branches of the bare tree looks as much like the pattern of a bare oak as possible, so I was playing around with another design, though I haven't stuck on it yet. At any rate, I decided to use the original bare tree I drew to make a mulberry tree. According to the SCA rules, that was to be round, too, but I didn't know if that was literal, and I found a pretty common shape for mulberry trees that would be supported by the bare tree I drew,
I followed a similar design pattern as with the oak, making it so a straight leaf would be at the top of the tree and the edges, but using somewhat curved leaves in between to help it look more organic. I use the pointed shape of the leaves to poke out the five nubs in the tree shape I was modeling, which appropriately followed the five corners on the leaves,
Then I wanted to try to do an elm tree, since I already made some elm leaves for something else I was drawing, so I tried to find examples of elms in heraldry. SCA again lists it as a roundish tree, but looking around, there were a lot of counter-examples, including more conical shaped elms and rectangular shaped elms. Eventually, I ran across a very distinct looking elm on an SCA member website,
I then found a very nice photo of a bare elm, where the naked tree looked like something spooky from a horror story, so I wanted to draw it, and developed an elm from that tree shape,
I'm not quite happy with the large leaved version of the elm, I'd still have to play around with it more to see if it could work better. I'm still wondering about the shape for elm trees, since I found photos of elm trees in many different types of shapes; I think the shape of the tree depends on the species.. the model I worked from I think was an American Elm.
I also saw some crests with tree stumps, so I decided to draw some, from the tree vector I was using earlier and the elm leaves,
For the color, I'm using the old vert (0-150-0), while not necessarily the best green, seems to give the proper tone to trees and foliage,
The contrast makes the darker green look almost black actually.
In the process, I did a lot of research on trees in heraldry, finding a couple useful pages, including this entry on trees from Parker's Heraldry -- tlinkhis seems to be the same thing in book form -- and visual images of different types of trees that were used in heraldry in a Heraldry Dictionary, although I'm not sure that helps (also found a tree indentification page)
Any comments are welcome,
redfish
I'll be showing some recent vector design I did in this post; please don't hesitate to criticize it or explain to me why what I did wouldn't work well for heraldic design. That's primarily the reason I'm making this post; I want to check with the experts here and see whether I'm going down the right track. There was some work involved for me, but it wasn't that bad; I can easily change things or change course to something else. Most of the time I spent was researching things on the web, not drawing.
I got interested in the idea of designing tree vectors after enderandrew's request for help; he had the design with the lion and oak tree. The only oak tree vectors I found on the web were either stylized as large branches, so, while very nice, didn't exactly match the look of the design he asked for, or had borders around all of the parts, while I wanted to try to make a borderless, stencil-like design. My first attempt was to group the leaves together like in the bordered design, and then cut out the borders from the base image. This didn't end up looking to well, especially at a distance, because it started to look really busy when it was shrunk.
But, I wanted to continue to experiment down these lines... to see if I could make a full oak design that would both look distinct on a coat of arms and work as a stencil. The trees that just had large branches looked nice on a coat of arms, but I wanted to try something different.
So, I first drew a bare tree, and the idea was to wind the leaves around the branches. An image of the bare tree, in two versions --
With the leaves put in, it ended up looking good, but not necessarily good for a charge. Zooming out, the I made the leaves a little two small. I did some research on the web to see if there were any standards for trees in heraldry, and eventually came across a page on the SCA's heraldry website, where, according to their rules, trees would largely be distinguishable by their shape, with the oak listed as a rounded shape, as is commonly seen, though not always, on crests,
I looked a bit around for examples and counter-examples, and I found a lot of roundish shaped oaks in the Wikipedia page for "Oaks in heraldry", as well as other shapes, but a particular round shape I found was pretty pleasing, and even though most oak trees probably aren't round, it looked like something that would be really distinct as an oak tree from a distance.
That you would have difficulty translating to stencil form, but I wanted to model my tree shape after it. After seeing some crests with trees where the leaves weren't always the same exact shape as each other, I decide to do something similar in order to help both make the tree look a little more organic, and help form the shape. The first version I did looked good, but I was concerned that it might not be distinguishable from other trees at a distance, per the leaves, so I made a version with larger leaves, which give it a more oakish quality,
I don't know that the pattern of branches of the bare tree looks as much like the pattern of a bare oak as possible, so I was playing around with another design, though I haven't stuck on it yet. At any rate, I decided to use the original bare tree I drew to make a mulberry tree. According to the SCA rules, that was to be round, too, but I didn't know if that was literal, and I found a pretty common shape for mulberry trees that would be supported by the bare tree I drew,
I followed a similar design pattern as with the oak, making it so a straight leaf would be at the top of the tree and the edges, but using somewhat curved leaves in between to help it look more organic. I use the pointed shape of the leaves to poke out the five nubs in the tree shape I was modeling, which appropriately followed the five corners on the leaves,
Then I wanted to try to do an elm tree, since I already made some elm leaves for something else I was drawing, so I tried to find examples of elms in heraldry. SCA again lists it as a roundish tree, but looking around, there were a lot of counter-examples, including more conical shaped elms and rectangular shaped elms. Eventually, I ran across a very distinct looking elm on an SCA member website,
I then found a very nice photo of a bare elm, where the naked tree looked like something spooky from a horror story, so I wanted to draw it, and developed an elm from that tree shape,
I'm not quite happy with the large leaved version of the elm, I'd still have to play around with it more to see if it could work better. I'm still wondering about the shape for elm trees, since I found photos of elm trees in many different types of shapes; I think the shape of the tree depends on the species.. the model I worked from I think was an American Elm.
I also saw some crests with tree stumps, so I decided to draw some, from the tree vector I was using earlier and the elm leaves,
For the color, I'm using the old vert (0-150-0), while not necessarily the best green, seems to give the proper tone to trees and foliage,
The contrast makes the darker green look almost black actually.
In the process, I did a lot of research on trees in heraldry, finding a couple useful pages, including this entry on trees from Parker's Heraldry -- tlinkhis seems to be the same thing in book form -- and visual images of different types of trees that were used in heraldry in a Heraldry Dictionary, although I'm not sure that helps (also found a tree indentification page)
Any comments are welcome,
redfish
(Just because something appeared on period arms doesn't make it a 'good' style haha... just ask me to show you the German Roll (on the floor with laughter) sometime 
