It's part of what makes our game in the SCA so entrancing, right? Flags and banners, waving in the breeze, wafting gently above tents, lofted brazenly by columns of combatants on their way to the battlefield...
But what about when you've got a fairly modern venue, like a 4H Campground? How does one "medieval that up"?
When the Middle Kingdom 50th Year Celebration approached, the Event Stewards, Hadley and Maggie, reached out to get armory images from each of the Baronies. They had a vision for the event site's main walkway, called the Promenade. It was to be the main throughway for all the foot traffic on-site, and they had the opportunity to make it reflect the history of our Kingdom.
Together with Sir Omarad, they wanted to make flags to go on the light posts along the walkway.
Aren't they pretty? But it wasn't as simple as just getting an image from each Barony. To make them consistent, it was important to create each one to fit the particular height and width ratio that was needed.
I volunteered to make each of these according to Sir O's specifications, because I wanted them to be spectacular! Stupendous! Consistent!
To this end, because the images needed to be significant in size, I taught myself how to use Inkscape, which is a vector graphics program. Now, some of these images are quite complex, and well beyond my abilities as a beginning vector artist, so I entreated my friend Cormac Mor, who runs Poore-House.com, to let me use his armory images as a starting point for many of the charges. Not all, but quite a few are his actual art, vectorized.
Now, heraldic display depends on its container, and Master Cormac's images are in the traditional escutcheon shape. You can't just slap a plain escutcheon on a tall rectangle, and have it look good! Each device should be laid out to take as much room as available, and everything should be balanced and visible. These flags are significantly taller than the average escutcheon shape, so some layout work had to be done.
Bends needed to reach from corner to corner, even though the slant angle was significantly different than they are normally displayed. Shattered Crystal, with its little gems, normally has a much more square arrangement, and so each crystal had to be placed just so to take up the full space available to the whole charge group. Cynnabar, who normally displays their tower between the tips of its wreath, had the room to move that completely up and above it.
In the end, I did wind up creating quite a few of these completely from scratch, including the little castles for the Barony of Carraig Ban (so many little bricks!)
For my effort, we got a product that used the same wreath throughout, and had the same bold heraldic colors, and nice clear graphics. Sir Omarad added the little scroll that indicated when each Barony was created.
A team effort, and it came out as pretty as I imagined it.
