Colours

From DrawShield Documentation

Traditional heraldry has quite a restricted range of colours. This was largely because the original intention was instant recognition of arms, even from a distance or in poor light. There was no room for debate about whether a shade was "scarlet" or "maroon" - in early heraldry if it look "reddish" then red it was! Although the names for heraldic colours did not come from English but other languages, mostly French, so the heraldic word for "all shades of red" is actually gules from a French word for an ermine skin dyed red.

Main Heraldic Colours

So the basic heraldic colours are: >Argent, Azure, Gules, Or, Sable, Purpure, Vert. These words appear so often in blazons that you will often find them abbreviated, for example sa. for "sable". DrawShield supports all the common abbreviations but for readability the full name is recommended.

Secondary Heraldic Colours

As heraldry became more ceremonial further colours were added to allow a greater range of variation between arms and the following colours are now accepted as part of the heraldic tradition: >Murrey, Carnation, Brunatre, Bisque, Senois, Sanguine, Cendree, Rose, Celestial Azure, Tenne, Orange. In general these colours are less common and should not be abbreviated.

Examples of common and secondary colours are shown in the image here.

Colours.png



Modern Colours

In recent years there is a further set of colours that have generally been accepted as "heraldic" - they appear less often but are found in modern arms, including in American Military insignia: iron, bronze, copper, lead, steel, buff, red-ochre, yellow-ochre, crimson

Usage

In almost all cases the colour comes after the thing it is describing, so we might have, for example a lion gules.

It might seem that many blazons don't follow this rule as they start with a colour, e.g. argent, a lion gules but in reality this is just because the common start phrase has been omitted, the full description would actually be:

The field argent charged with a lion gules


Where the field is the "background" of the shield. Since every blazon should start with the field anyway it is usually omitted, so the first colour is assumed to be applied to the field. (DrawShield does support the full description if you wish to use it).

Some things are give more than one colour, in which case you should just list as you would in an English sentence. It is recommend that for readability you separate colours with either a comma or the word and.


See Also

Palettes - how we decide which colour codes to use to represent heraldic colours.

Colour Alternatives - Other ways to specify colours.