earlyBlazon.com
I am not an historian although I like history.
I am not a graphic designer although I drew all the coats of arms myself.
I do not earn any money from this site although I would like to.
I am not a genealogist although I am intrested in my own roots.
So who am I ?
To make it brief, I would say that I was born in 1970 and I live in Europe.
That is, maybe, too short.
To expand, my professionnal background has been oriented toward engineering (I
work in car industry) but I like to spend time with my family, friends and in
libraries.
Why create an armory of the Albigensian Crusade ?
Firstly because the history is important. Secondly because early blazons have
simple shapes and therefore are easier to draw than modern coat of arms.
Technique
All blazons displayed in this site are made the same way. First, simple shapes
are drawn "by hand", whereas complex patterns are scanned (or taken from clipart),
before being exported into a vector based graphic software (Draw 3.0 greenstreet
software). These patterns are simply put together to create the coats of arms.
Then, in order to have a more colorful drawing, the blazon is exported into a
bitmap graphic software which adds textures in a million colours. Finally the
image is downsized into a 16 colors GIF file (256 colors if the result is not
satisfactory).
It's not very difficult, but very time consuming.