I’ve gathered together the colours I use in heraldry and have found from resources old and new, and put them all in a single place.

It’ll serve as a useful reference to myself and my clients for coats of arms I work on in future and might be a help to someone else to use.

Just like my Escutcheon Style Guide – this isn’t a definitive collection – and the colours might vary when I use them in a piece of artwork.

Please download and share – and if you have any suggestions as to how to further improve this – just let me know!

I couldn’t find a definitive classification of the many styles of escutcheons (shield shapes) used in heraldry. Shapes seem to vary from artist to artist drawing coats of arms and they even change between revisions depending on fashions of the time of the whim of those that commission the artwork.

So I’ve researched the most common forms and compiled a list of them that my clients can choose from for their coat-of-arms designs.

There doesn’t seem to be a naming convention for shield shapes beyond the basic Victorian “Heater”, the Norman/Viking “Kite”, the Roman “Scutum” and the mediaeval “Buckler”.

Here I’ve used a Latin descriptor for each of the four styles – “Acutus” (acute) , “Rotundus” (rounded), “Crispus” (curly) and “Curuis” (curvaceous!) and given the headers a name – flat, concave, convex, peaked, corner, serpentine. Making a grid of main shapes and headers.

This isn’t a definitive collection – there are far too many shapes and much more fanciful ones out there, but I’ve kept these to the most practical types for the work I do.

Please download and share – and if you have any suggestions as to further styles and shape – let me know!

Download escutcheon shield styles