The Stag and Griffin

Shortly after we were married, my husband and I decided it would be awesome to design a coat of arms for our family, combining his traditional shield, and mine.  The idea is that we'd plaster it EVERYWHERE...pins, patches, lunchboxes, blankets...basically brand our future children with it!  So, after a lot of serious research and silly ideas, we came up this this!

My side was easy, as my family comes from a very specific part of Germany and my shield was easy to find.  In most versions, it's a simple black bull's head with a yellow crown and his tongue sticking out, on a gold background.  In some versions, however, the shield is divided in half, with a black bull on gold on one half, and a red griffin on white on the other.  We decided to go with just the bull, but used the red griffin as the charge on my side.

My husband's side took a little more creativity.  There are two versions of his shield: one from Ireland, and one from England.  He's not exactly sure where he's from, so we decided to smush both versions into one!  The Irish had a black chevron (the triangle thing in the middle) with three black Jerusalem crosses on a white background.  It also had a black chief (bar across the top) with three white stag heads in it.  The English had a blue chevron with three blue crescents on it.  We chose to mix the black crosses with the blue chevron on a white background, and put the black chief across the entire shield, not just his half.  Instead of the stag heads, we made the stag the charge on his side, and made it gold to balance out the colours and because it looks nice.  At the last minute, we also threw in a crescent on the chevron, to reference the English shield, and also because we found out the crescent symbolizes "the second son", which my husband is.  Made it a bit busy, but oh well.

For the crest/mantle/helm, we chose a normal knight's helmet, which is on my husband's shield, and would usually symbolize knighthood.  My crest as quite an elaborate king's crown, given that we were once a royal family, but since through my marriage I would no longer technically have that high royal status, I went with the Germanic crown for "lesser nobility".  Then we threw in a generic mantle and added some colours that looked nice.

I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out, though it's not perfect.  There's something about the balance that's off that I wish I could fix, but by the time I noticed it was too late, and I'm not sure what I could have done anyway.  It's not like I could have made the stag fatter, haha, and I hate those skinny, cat-like griffins you often see.  What I probably should have done is brought the mantle down further so it framed it better.  Oh well, maybe one day I'll redo it.  Or get someone more talented than me to do it.

On a final note, I was going to upload it "as-is", but for some reason deviantART wasn't letting me upload the image as a gif.  I didn't want just a plain white background, so I threw in a couple borders I found in the public domain, put on a few filters, and voila!  A tapestry!  Made it darker than I originally had it (as evidenced by the fact that the white is no longer white) and also quite a bit busier, but I think it pulled together alright.

Yay for giant wall of text!