Coat of Arms

A few years ago, I got a trademark for my logo. That’s cool and all, but it’s not really silly enough. I decided to make a coat of arms for myself. Plus, I’m not very good at vector images, so I like to do these dumb things periodically to refresh my memory. First, I needed an idea. I had thought about quartering the shield with different things that interested me. Books. Technology. Napping. Nothing really struck my inspiration bone.

While reading The Count of Monte Cristo for the 453246345324th time, I came across this description of Edmond Dantes’ coat of arms.

“the island of Montecristo, on a sea azure, with a cross gules on the shield.”

Well, I already stole the dude’s name, so why not steal his coat of arms. I mean, he’s a fictional character. The book is in the public domain. Who’s going to sue me?

So that’s where I started. I looked for a shield shape that I liked, and got to work. Taking a picture of Montecristo and turning it into a vector was a huge pain in the ass.  I thought it would be fun showing the island’s reflection in the water, so I created another layer, flipped it tweaked the perspective, and added a fade.

Obviously, I’m an atheist so I replaced the cross with my logo. I figured the yellow could represent the sun. Plus it worked with the huge amount of blue. The clouds were just a bunch of circles stacked on top of each other.

 

 

 

 

 

My favorite part is the waves and the birds. If you look very closely, they are actually shaped like open books. A bunch of copy and paste later, and that was done. I had originally considered building an anchor (representing my love of the sea) into the bottom of the shield, but that proved to be super difficult, and it didn’t look right anyway. Instead, I put a rope around the shield. That enabled me to learn a new thing called a pattern along a path. It didn’t turn out great, especially around the tight corners, but unless you’re looking for it, you won’t notice.

 

 

 

For the helmet, since I’m not actually a count, or even nobility, I had to think of something else. Since I’m the Profit (that’s the correct spelling in this case) of Keanubianism, my totally real and not at all made up religion based around the Great Keanu Reeves, and our version of the pontif’s mitre is a jester’s hat in a crown, I used that. Normally, it would be 7 pointed to show my high ranking in the Church, but that looked too crowded, so I went with 5. Let’s pretend the other two are out of view. The colors have no significance.

 

 

The two supporters are red and black dragons because I love ASOIAF and am sworn to House Targaryen. I know. “The dragon must have three heads.” But I couldn’t make that work. It was kind of fun getting one claw to be in front of the shield and one behind it. And by “fun”, I mean tedious and annoying.

 

 

 

 

 

Last up was the motto. House words. Catch phrase. I decided to round back to The Count of Monte Cristo. The final lines in the book are:

“Darling,” replied Valentine, “has not the count just told us that all human wisdom is summed up in two words: ‘Wait and hope!'”

Wait and hope. I put that through an online translator and came up with “Expecta et Sperare”. I put it on top of a sword because it looked cool and because pirates.

 

 

So now I have a somewhat decent looking coat of arms. Do I need one? Nope. Was it fun to build? Eh. It was ok. But now I can say I have a coat of arms.