My New COA

[Sir Brian]

I humbly ask you noble sirs to please provide me with your opinions of which of new COA designs looks best. 

First:


Second:


Third:



Thank you for your opinions! 

[Sir William]

Sir Brian, I actually prefer the third, if only because of its coventional placement of your charges AND the separator is a flat line...kinda like the wavy one too, but the first one I'd only use if it were for a female knight or... -at-arms.

[Sir Edward]

Wow, that's a difficult choice. I mean, I like the classic straight lines, but you also don't see people doing the more complex transitions like the first one very often. It's pretty cool. But I really love graceful curves too, like the middle one. Ugh.

This is why I drew up more than 40 variations before settling down on my current heraldry. My only recommendation is to be 100% sure you have what you want before getting a banner from Dirk & Arrow.

[Sir Wolf]

2 and 3 have my eye. i like the more complex of 2 but then i like the simplicity of 3 ahhhhhhhhhhh

[Dragonlover]

I like them all, Sir Brian, but I would have to go with two, or three....

[Sir Brian]

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and opinions! I think I prefer the wavy line of division on the chief but have also considered inverting the color/metal of the chief so it would look like this:


as an alternate to the previous second choice. 

[Sir Wolf]

now i think i like the white better with the black rose!

[Sir Brian]

Yeah me too! The more I look at it the better I like it! The best part is I won't have to change the color/metal of my torse whenever I pull the great helm out of semi-retirement! 

[Sir Edward]

Interesting. I hadn't thought to try that, which is ironic since that's what I did with mine. Black and white go with everything, but the white has a very different feel. In my case, it somehow felt more knightly to go with blue/white instead of blue/black as the main colors. Stepping out of darkness, perhaps?

I wish I could see both combinations on your surcoat side-by-side. Heh. Maybe we need to do a little photoshopping.

[Sir Edward]

OK, let's look at this:

 

[Sir Wolf]

i dont think it would look like that on a surcoat. remember the rules of heraldry. isnt the top to become the right hand side and the bottom the left? i'm trying to remember. we had it in an earlier posting. it does look cool though.

[Sir Edward]

You know, I have no idea. It would be a good thing to have all figured out before putting it to fabric!

EDIT: I had been under the assumption that it would either match the shield exactly, or otherwise if you're going with a two-color vertical split like mine, that you'd want to preserve which color is in dexter and which is in sinister. This makes my current surcoat backwards, since the white should be in dexter (the wearer's right).

[Sir Brian]

Lol, most excellent Sir Edward and thank you that helps immensely but I believe Sir Wolf might be correct.
That was part of what is wrong with my original surcoat. - At most it should have been quartered.
For the new COA I believe the primary color and metal will suffice for the surcoat.
(Besides I could seriously hurt myself trying to sew those wavy stitch lines!)

So with my paltry attempt of blazonry I came up with this:

Vert, a gryphon or segreant. On a chief wavy argent, a rose sable.

[Sir Wolf]

huzzah!

[Sir Edward]

Most excellent. I did some quick googling, and I couldn't find anything specific about rules for translating it to the surcoat, except some mention that the surcoats sometimes had additional charges not in the heraldry.

So yeah, unless we can find better documentation, I'd stick with parti-colored (per-pale, like mine) or quarterly (per cross), and just preserve which colors/metals are in dexter and sinister.

So for me, I should switch the colors, and put the dragon and ankh over their correct colors.