Palettes
Emblazoning heraldic tinctures

Von Volborth says:

Heraldic colours should be strong and true. Red, for instance, should neither be too purplish nor too orange, nor lean towards pink or brown. Blue should not be purplish or greenish. Green should not lean too much towards yellow or blue, and the heraldic purpure is more red-purple than blue-purple. Gold may be represented by yellow, preferably a mixture of yellow and ochre. White may substitute for silver, but a watery, very light grey represents the metal more appropriately.

… but I disagree with him on his last point!

Painting

Anthony Wood (in Friar) offered the following table of Recommended Designers Colours.

I’ve added colour chips from a Winsor & Newton Designers Gouache Colours colour chart [PDF] – except Dark Grey, which seems to be no longer available… The Dark Grey shown here is just 333.

Graphics software

In modern graphic design, in print and on the Web, we tend to pay close attention to the exact colours we’re using, and graphics software lets us specify our choices with great precision. But the mediæval herald did not have the benefit of RGB palettes or the Pantone Matching System (PMS)!

There is no one “right” specification for any heraldic tincture. Nevertheless, the same principles that guide the artist working with paints or inks should guide the graphic artist working with FreeHand or Illustrator. The following figures set out some guidelines, but no more than that.

Red-centric palette

Gules can be represented by R (= red) or R+: my preference is for the darker colour.

R++ must be reserved for Sanguine, if you have to use it. Maroon is slighty darker than R++ and can also be used for Sanguine.

Or seems best represented by Au – logically enough! Au is a little paler than Y+ or gold, which can serve just as well. Y (= yellow) itself strikes me as too bright for representing the yellow of mediæval armory.

What would logically be Y++ is actually O-: this and orange are clearly good choices for Tenné, but O seems a better choice for contrast with or.

My preference is to use pure white – W (= white) – for argent, with G- used only to shade large expanses of solid argent that could look too stark otherwise.

Some writers – e.g., von Volborth – do suggest using a pale grey (e.g., G- or silver) to “best represent the metal”. But my feeling is that the mediæval armorists used argent (or silver) poetically for what was really white paint (or white cloth in a banner or a horse’s caparison).

Sable is best represented by G++: N (= black) will do, but my art teachers tended to admonish me for using pure black in any artwork!

Green-centric palette

Any pure green can serve for vert; my preference is for V+.

Blue-centric palette

Heraldic azure is often described as the colour of the sky on a clear day — hence my choice here. (However, any blue hue that is neither too fuchsian nor too cyanic will do!)

Bleu céleste (if you’re not restricting yourself to mediæval armory) can be represented by B- or B--; skyblue is OK, but somewhat grey. 9cf (the nearest browser-safe colour to skyblue) works well, or 69f, which is what the UN website uses.

But if you do use bleu céleste…

… you may wish to use a purer blue for azure.

If your outlook is modern, you’ll want to distinguish between purpure and Murrey – purpure then should be more blue (P or a lighter colour)…

… and Murrey more red.

But if Murrey doesn’t figure in your heraldry, you can balance red and blue by using purple (or browser-safe colours with the same hue) or – my preference! – use the mulberry colour like the early mediæval heralds.

Petra Sancta

A system of hatching devised by and named after Sylvester Petra Sancta, a seventeenth-century Jesuit writer on heraldry, is commonly used where colour is not available and tricking is inappropriate – silverware, bookplates, carving in wood and stone. Woodcock & Robinson cite Charles I’s death warrant (1649) as one of the earliest examples of hatching in England.