I have been looking at Armorial Gold’s list of clipart and it seems impressive. The question is though, is it worth the $100.00 price tag? Also is it easy to work with?

It really depends on what your goals are. Armorial Gold is extremely limiting in that all of the artwork is redrawn from historical examples that are now out of copyright (check out Dover books). Therefore the only images available are ones derived from particular drawings and might not be appropriate (in an aesthetic sense) for another project. A lion, dragon, etc. drawn to fit onto a particular shield in a particular layout might not fit another shield as well. In addition, most of it is very dated. A lot of that artwork comes from the late 19th/early 20th century and many of the examples of helms, mantling, etc., can be found in A Complete Guide to Heraldry (Fox-Davies 1909).

So, if you want to play around with shields and achievements and don’t want to draw, it may not be a bad investment. If you want to create original heraldry (design and develop coats of arms and crests), you may find it very limiting in its scope.

I have Armorial Gold and I love it. It’s a very extensive collection and it come with monthly downloads of new pieces. Allow me to say that, though I love it and use it primarily when coming up with designs, I only use it for drafts and playing with ideas in it’s original form. It’s clip art and built as such so there it lacks character and originality that most people seek when it comes to designing arms.

The files comes in .WMF format, which opens in Illustrator. They are all vectors (they resize smoothly) and built on layers. Downside is that some of the designs are lacking aesthetically and some are built weird so it takes time to edit and get to what you want.

So I say, if you use the computer a lot it’s worth the money. The extras that are included like the Tartans, Blazon, Motto, and newsletter are good to have. There are also a couple of CoA collections within the pack…State Seals and American Arms Roll that are fun to have. Plus, you can contact them for a custom design if needed (additional charges apply).

Kenneth Mansfield;96330 wrote:

It really depends on what your goals are. Armorial Gold is extremely limiting in that all of the artwork is redrawn from historical examples that are now out of copyright (check out Dover books). Therefore the only images available are ones derived from particular drawings and might not be appropriate (in an aesthetic sense) for another project. A lion, dragon, etc. drawn to fit onto a particular shield in a particular layout might not fit another shield as well. In addition, most of it is very dated. A lot of that artwork comes from the late 19th/early 20th century and many of the examples of helms, mantling, etc., can be found in A Complete Guide to Heraldry (Fox-Davies 1909).

So, if you want to play around with shields and achievements and don’t want to draw, it may not be a bad investment. If you want to create original heraldry (design and develop coats of arms and crests), you may find it very limiting in its scope.

Well said.

There’s always the free collection available from Wikimedia Commons:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SVG_coats_of_arms

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Coat_of_arms_elements

There is also a listing of links to free on-line heraldic clipart at the blog "Heraldry: Musings on an esoteric topic" at http://blog.appletonstudios.com

Go down the left-hand column to "On-Line Heraldic Clipart".

I, too, have Armorial Gold, and use for some very basic sorts of drawing of coats of arms, but the style of its drawings is somewhat idiosyncratic and not always especially useful.

Contrary to an earlier posting, Armorial Gold’s offerings are not redrawings of older, out of copyright items, e.g., from Fox-Davies.  But they do have their own style, which is pretty readily identifiable as such if you look at them.

David

I’ll add another vote for Amorial Gold. It is true that some of the images are a bit quirky, but for many elements such as lions, wyverns, etc., there are so many variations that at least one should prove satisfactory. It is a truly VAST collection of heraldic clipart.

I would agree that if you are a skilled enough artist to draw anything you might need freehand then sure, don’t bother with it. But even if you don’t use the images directly they still serve as a nice template to paint over using something like Corel Painter or a similar natural media simulator.

It’s not worth it, most of what’s on it is done rather poorly in my opinion.  I wasn’t impressed.  I got it because sometimes I want to just whip up an emblazon quickly to see if it works or not…but everything is so dang ugly I can’t bring myself to use it.

I purchased it last night and so far I like it.

I am not a professional at this as some of you are and really it is more of a toy for me to play with than anything else. I spoke to Mike at the company and he was very nice and eventhough I paid to download it he is also going to send me the CD set at no extra cost.

J. Stolarz;96381 wrote:

It’s not worth it, most of what’s on it is done rather poorly in my opinion.  I wasn’t impressed.  I got it because sometimes I want to just whip up an emblazon quickly to see if it works or not…but everything is so dang ugly I can’t bring myself to use it.

There are some winning designs in there, but for the most part you are correct. For the price and the amount of clip art you get, it really is a value. The monthly updates makes it worth it alone IMO.

Does anyone know who runs Amorial Gold? Seems like the individual would be an active member of the heraldic scene.