That is, I believe, a library of the coats of arms for members of several families.
A strange way of putting it. May I clarify? It's one person's half-and-halfed shield, one half being the heraldry technically inherited from one parent, the other half being of the other parent. Each parents' half is in turn halved to represent the entire shield owner's grandparents, in similarly recursive detail, to the n
th generation.
Ultimately, because it isn't fractal and there
must be a limit, at the lowest levels are the much simpler patterns (bends sinister, etc) that were used by a given progenitor. But due to the way ancestry converges[1] as well as spreads, there are ultimately people who are represented in several different places upon the shield (or at least similarly-heralded people who
do themselves have a common ancestor, and were entitled to similar arms), so there's obvious repetitions.
(Oh yeah, the rules of tincture generally doesn't apply to the separate halves/quarters/etc of the field, so colour against colour or metal against metal is allowed there. Forgot to say.)
Myself, I can't possibly consider sullying my shield with parentage, given that the 'Starver' entity is a construct in cyberspace inheriting nothing in that realm, and even my IRL parents (and my IRL self, who might be considered to have 'begat' this representative voice) are without entitlement to IRL battle-standards of any kinds, so I'm not dividing my shield at all and (with the one big exception of doing something that medieval heraldry could
never have achieved, and would probably have written a rule against anyway) I've decided to Keep It Simple Stupid.
But first the written description, to which I
didn't stick too much to the usually required "KISS", and had to take liberties with the (somewhat deliberately 'Faux' Heraldic-style) French, but here's is the verbal version:
Escutchion: Field Sable,
Nabot barbe-Argent Olive de agicole alterné avec Fleche descendre Olive de faim dexter-fess,
Deux Parcelle double-wavy Olive de sol defoncer fess et sinister-fess,
Tous Caractere de faible qualité.
Helm: un Tube Cathodique.
Supporters: Souris et Clavier de Ordinateur, salient.
Motto: "Nil Operundi: Enim Nutrimens, Il Verminus Venatio "
(That's a black background; a silver-bearded dwarf of 'olive' tone for farming, alternated with a downwards arrow indicating hunger, in the middle-left; two 'fields' (two squiggly lines[2]) of ploughed soil [note: no plants!] in centre and centre-right); The 'characters' intentionally represented in low resolution[3]; The helm (taking liberties here, in several ways) is a CRT, and the supporters (ditto) are keyboard and mouse[4]. I'll leave the faux-Latin motto up to you to work out[5]. And darnit! I forgot to draw it and its scroll into the image! Decide not to make any appropriate wreath or other decoration.)
(Slightly bigger than Avatar size, at the moment. May avatarize or make a .sig-sized flag of it later.)
Originally I started off thinking of using "Or" (gold) tincture instead of the "Olive" (not a normal heraldic colour, and you need to imagine it pronounced with a French accent
), and now I realise I've broken the Rules Of Tincture that I mentioned, with olive on black. (But at least I haven't got it messing with the 'silver beard'.)
Oh, and the fact that Coats Of Arms weren't originally animated, I've ignored. That's surely a mere consequence of the fact that they
couldn't make (automatic) animations, prior to more recent technology.
(But what do you expect on two hours' sleep?!)
[1] One might say "especially with the nobility", but I'm betting that a largely immobile population of the serfs of those eras would have a similarly intertwined "family bush".
[2] What's the Faux-French for 'tilde'?
[3] Though I quadratically smudge them, in the actual picture. Should have kept it sharper, really.
[4] In the image, I drew the CRT first and the the keyboard last. Mostly with splines but with (pre rotation) a few 'square' brush-hits for the keyboard keys. You can tell that I'm not particularly artistic, but that once I get
into GIMP, I tend to improve significantly in my pixel-pushing style. Decided to blur the 'helm' to make it fit in a bit better, but as I'm probably not
allowed helm or supporters, let's not obsess about that, eh?
[5] Had considered "Ave? Ave Munde? Hoc Res Opera Est?".