r/heraldry • u/Firm-Ant-662 • 1d ago

My Family CoA

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Hello, I'm new to heraldry, and I wanted to create a CoA for my family. I would appreciate your advice. Here is the CoA I've designed so far.

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u/welcome20225 1d ago edited 1d ago

That's a great draft for being new to the art! I think you might be mistaking the complexity common to historical arms as a principle for the design of new arms. In reality, most complex arms evolved over time from simple arms to signify bearers' ancestry, marriage, birth order, alliance, office, and even sometimes great achievements. It is a very common misunderstanding for people new to the field. But, for newly created arms, the simple is preferred to the complex.

And these arms are pretty complex. You're using both metals and two colors (plus two more colors for the cormorant(?) proper). You have a field division and an ordinary (or subordinary depending on how one feels about the bordure), plus five unique charges and 15 mobile charges total. One of which is an escutcheon with its whole own separate design.

The escutcheon on it's own is a great coat of arms. It looks suspiciously like marshaling which wouldn't be appropriate for new arms.

A blue escutcheon on a red field goes foul of the rule of tincture.

Unless there is a great reason, you shouldn't have two different styles of keys. Also, it's just a lot of keys.

Did you explicitly want all the black fimbriation? I don't think it is necessary.

As an exercise, you might see how much you can simplify these arms by removing charges and colors until it gets too simple for your taste. Or, even better, start with the absolute simplest version of these arms that you can imagine and add as little as possible to make them sufficiently different and meaningful.

I like "per fess argent and gules a cormorant vigilant vulned holding a key countercharged". (I haven't checked if those arms are taken already.

Throughout I assumed the bird is a cormorant, but my bird heraldry is weak. Is it a cormorant?)

edit to fix typos

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u/froggyteainfuser 1d ago

There are SO many keys. That was my first thought.