Palettes

Background

We saw earlier in the description of Colours:heraldic colours that in the early days of heraldry a word such as gules just meant "red" and that in creating actual shields anything that could be recognised as "red" would be sufficient.

When drawing arms on a modern computer screen we have (literally) thousands of precise digital values to choose from, all which might appear "red". Which should we use?

In reality this becomes a matter of discretion for the heraldic artist; however over time some common "mappings" between heraldic colour names and digital colours have evolved. These have been based on aesthetic considerations, perhaps to make them clearly distinct or complement each other well; or to match the colour sets used in some related field. For our purposes we refer to these mappings between heraldic and digital colours as a palette.

DrawShield has a default palette, the origin of which is lost in time (I found them somewhere on the internet about 10 years ago), however other palettes, with a better pedigree and rationale can also be used!

They can be chosen using either the preferences pane on the "Create" Page, or by the Drawing Instructions drawn using the (whatever) palette.

The currently available palettes are shown here.

Their origins and purposes are as follows:

Wikipedia: Now the default selection, taken from the Illustrated Atlas of Heraldry on Wikimedia commons^[1]
DrawShield: Origin unknown, but not an unpleasant selection
Wappenwiki: Based on those used on the extensive Wappenwiki heraldry site^[2]
Emoji: A more colourful set, suggested by a contributor^[3]
CC3: A set of colours chosen to complement the default symbol set of the map making software Campaign Cartographer 3^[4]
bajuvarian: (These can only be selected using the Drawing Instructions. I have no idea what they were suggested by a contributor^[5]