Arms of James Stewart of Atholl

[Chas]

Hi Standard,

I use a combination of programmes and sources. For the end result, I too use MS Paint. Although many disparage it, I have found it to be 'small, but mighty'.

I have Photoshop CS and Illustrator CS (which are of course both industry standard), But I have found them to be too complex for my needs. It is like an eight year old kiddie wanting a push-along scooter, but all he is given is a Harley. Beautiful to look at, but he will not be able to use it for years and years.

I have all the Seriff products, but have not used them for years. I also use PaintShopPro as an transition programme.

For sources, I first look to Wikipedia. All graphics on Wikipedia are copyright free. In the 'Commons' part of Wikipedia is a vast repository of heraldic imagery.

They are in the .png (scaleable vector graphic) format and in the main have been produced using 'Inkscape' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape It is a free to download programme and some say that it is as powerful as Photoshop.

I am trying teach myself, but am not having the success and progress that I hoped. So in the meantime I use Paint.

This is the process. Go to Wikipedia. I looked up 'clan', in the links at the foot of the page, I found 'Stewart', click. Halfway down Stewart is an infobox of Stewart arms. This is thumbnail of Stewart of Stewart:
Note the chequerboard stripe (fess) has 3 rows (standard for Stewart).
Clicking on the thumbnail brings you to the full sized image. You get four sizes to choose from - 200px, 500px, 1000px and 2000px. I always click on 2000.

The image is now as big as it is going to get. I then down load onto my computer. I have a separate folder in 'Downloads' for this. Once you have the image, you are able to manipulate as you wish. If I open a .png in Paint, I always get a black background. If I am after one of the charges on a different colour, no problem. If the charge is on black, then there are problems. If you notice the thumbnail above all the bits have a black outline - if you take away the black background, you loose all the black outlines as well. In that case, I open it in PaintShopPro and and copy to Paint. The background is now white.

After working on it, I always save as .png - it is easy to convert to .jpg, if I have to.

I have a library of charges, ordinaries and sub-ordinaries on a USB flash drive. I only work with the 'heater' shaped shields.

I know this all sounds a bit disjointed, but it is far easier to do than to talk about. My advice would be to find a heater shield shape to use as a master and start from there.

Regards

Chas

[WolfmanJack]

Wow! You've opened a whole new world for me, Chas.

[Chas]

Just for a bit of fun -



Regards

Chas

[WolfmanJack]

Wow! Thank you Chas, this is fantastic.

[Mike_Oettle]

Those are very useful tips, Chas. I have battled with armorial images for quite some time, and I think your advice will simplify things immensely.
Regards,
Mike