© 1994-2000 Thomas Barnes
originally appeared in the 1995 Known World Heraldic Symposium Proceedings
One of the most useful things that heralds can do to promote heraldry is to encourage people to make and display banners. Nothing makes a list field look more festive, or makes a tired church basement look more like a medieval hall than heraldic banners. Painted banners are cheap and easy to make. If you can sew a T-tunic and neatly color in a device submission form, you can make a painted banner. If you have a yard of cotton cloth, you can make a small gonfannon. So, why not make some banners at your next heraldry or sewing get together?
There were numerous types and shapes of flags that have been used for heraldic display. Essentially, they break down into three types, though the exact shapes and sizes varied.
Gonfannon - This is a roughly square or rectangular flag designed to be hung from a horizontal pole. It quite often has long dags at the bottom. What most SCA folk think of as being a "banner" is actually a gonfannon. In Period, gonfannons bore either the arms of their owners, a picture of a saint, or some badge or other symbol of significance to the owner.
Banner - This is a rectangular flag that is designed to be hung from a vertical pole. Early banners were wider than they were long. That is, the long side of the banner was attached to the staff. Later banners reversed this, so that they looked more like modern flags. In some areas, a long piece of fabric in the shape of a right triangle or rectangle hung from the upper corner of the fly-side of the banner. This "tail" was called a schwenkel or punta.
Standard - This is a long roughly triangular shaped flag with a rounded, pointed, or swallow-tailed fly end. They were quite complex, and often bore the arms, badges, and motto of their owner. They could be quite long.
Smaller triangular-shaped flags which only carried simple badges or arms were called pennons, guidons, pencils, streamers, ribbons, and pavons. Their exact dimensions varied and the fly ends could be rounded, swallow-tailed, or pointed.
For banners, tabards, tents and surcoats, I have found that acrylic paint on cotton or trigger works pretty well, so that's what I'll discuss. It's cheap, it's easy to do, and it requires a lot less skill than appliqued or embroidered banners.
You want an even-weave fabric that is smooth enough to paint well and heavy enough that the paint won't bleed through it easily and so that it won't skitter around on the floor or table. Trigger is acceptable; canvas, duck, or medium weight cotton is ideal. Two or three yards of material is sufficient for even the largest gonfannon, small flags like pennons might require only a few square feet of material.
If your are only doing one small banner then you can use acrylic fabric or craft paint from a hobby, fabric, or craft store. However, you can get pots of nice acrylic paint in heraldic colors in pint or quart sizes at any hardware store. This is much cheaper than buying paint in a fabric store and it's basically the same stuff. I have found that on fabric it doesn't matter if you use matte or gloss paint. The roughness of the fabric will make anything but the thickest, glossiest coat of gloss paint look flat.
You will also need a selection of small brushes. To quickly cover large areas you can use a 1" flat artist's acrylic brush or a 1" house painting brush. To fill in smaller areas quickly you want, 1/2" and 1/4" brushes. For detailing you want a #5 flat or round artist's watercolor or acrylic brush. Due to the roughness of the fabric, and the "coarseness" of the painting you will be doing, you can get away with cheap brushes from a hardware or discount store. Save your good brushes for painting and calligraphy. I have found that a short, stiff brush works better on fabric. If you find that the bristles of your brush are too long to control easily, cut them off short with a pair of scissors.
If your banner is at all complex, make a full-sized "cartoon" of your design and use dressmaker's tracing paper and a tailor's wheel to transfer the design to your cloth. I keep a large roll of paper around for patterns and disposable drop cloths. My favorite source for these is the local recycling center that has end rolls from local printers and newspapers where I can get them for free. You can get big rolls of paper for free or very cheap from your local newspaper.) For extremely simple designs you can sketch out your pattern on the cloth in a washable marker or tailors chalk (soap works just fine). For seme charges or charges that you must draw multiple times, a stencil is handy. You can make one using an ex-acto knife and construction cardboard.
If you are not an artist, a roll of change, an enlarging photocopier and the heraldry book of your choice can provide instant drawings of charges in the size that you need.
Before you paint your banner, you need to figure out what your design should will be like. Start with a thumbnail sketch on graph paper to get a sense of proportions and dimensions. Small pennons to go on the end of lances or tent poles can be quite small. A size that I've used successfully is about 12" x 30". For small flags that should catch the breeze use two layers of thin cloth. For gonfannons (the banners that hang from horizontal poles) 36" x 48" is a good size. It is big enough to be impressive, but small enough to be manageable. For gonfannons use the heaviest cloth you can get away with. You don't want them to flap in the wind, and lightweight cloth doesn't look right.
For some designs you might be able to get away with fully or partially piecing or sewing your banner together. This is just a matter of common sense. If your device is Per pale gules and Or, a fess counterchanged. then it's silly to paint your banner when you could sew it. On the other hand, if you have anything more complex than that, it's simpler to use paint for most of the banner and just piece things like simple lines of partition, bordures, and chiefs.
When you design your banner be sure to include the ribbons or loops that you will hang it from. How a banner hangs can change the way it looks and can sometimes alter its proportions. Also remember to buy a bit of extra material so that you can make ribbons or loops so you can hang your creation.
In most cases you will want to make your banner from two thicknesses of cloth sewn together and turned once they are sewn. The hemmed and turned edges keep the fly edges from fraying and hides any paint that might have bled through the material. A double thickness gonfannon also allows you to sew the dags at the bottom of the banner more evenly and permits you to quickly add decorative fringe around the edges.
The base color of your fabric also makes a difference in how the finished banner will look. If you have a banner that is more or less equal parts dark and light colors, always use cloth in the light color as your ground. It is easier to paint light fabric a darker color than it is to paint dark paint with a lighter color. Alternately, you can buy white cloth paint the entire design, but this is less efficient.
If you are painting a banner that is primarily argent use white cloth instead of gray. A gray field usually don't look right and is hard to match colors to, since most grays will have a bit of some color in them. Likewise, don't use pastel shades for your ground. Heraldic art should be vivid not washed-out.
After you've decided on your pattern and gotten all your patterns together you're ready to start. First, cut out your pattern pieces. If you have a double thickness banner then you should paint the pieces you're going to paint before you sew the banner together.
Pin your pattern to the paper, or otherwise make sure that it doesn't move around. This is especially important if you have a complex design, you have to lift your pattern to move the tracing paper around. In some cases, it's nice to lay out a grid on the fabric with a yardstick. Don't be afraid to mark up the cloth with measurements and sketches. The paint will cover most of it, and the first wash will get rid of the rest. Nothing is more frustrating than discovering that your design is off-center or flawed after you've traced it out, or worse, after you've started painting.
If you are using stencils, use a grid pattern and a stencil with a squared edge to insure that your pattern will repeat correctly. Then carefully trace each stencil with a tracing pencil. (Directly applying paint to the stencil doesn't work very well. It gets the stencil messy and guarantees that the paint will smear onto the fabric when you put the stencil down again.)
When you've got your pattern traced out, you can start painting. Use a stiff 1" or 1/2" brush to quickly cover the large areas you need to paint. You should only work with one color at a time. Not only is this more time efficient since you don't have to clean your brushes as often, it also prevents the possibility of paints accidently getting mixed. The danger of this technique is that you have to remember to keep you brush moist. Acrylic paints dry fast, and if you get dried paint up around the ferrule of the brush it makes the brush hard to clean and shortens the life of the brush. The paint will spread a bit more easily if you thin the paint on your brush with a bit of water. Be careful though, you want a thick coat of paint so that you get good coverage. Thin paints bleed into the fabric so that you don't get a uniform color.
Work towards you or from the center of the charge outward. Once you have covered all the areas you can safely cover using your largest brush, wash it out and keep working in the same color with progressively smaller brushes until you have roughly painted everything that you need to paint in that color.
Be very careful to not drip paint on your cloth or clothing. It is very difficult to get out of the fabric. If this happens, immediately soak the area with water and try to blot out the diluted paint with paper towels or rags. You can prevent drips by keeping your can of paint off the fabric and transferring only as much paint as you need to a saucer. The trick is to never have enough paint on the brush that it will drip. Less absorbent fabrics like trigger tend to bleed a bit more unpredictably, so be careful when painting on them, especially if you thin your paints.
Once you have blocked out the large areas you need to cover, let the paint dry. (Overnight is best, but you can get away with letting it sit for half an hour or so.) Then, using a finer brush start outlining your charges. Use black or some other color that contrasts nicely with the ground. Be careful to not get too involved in lining and internal detailing. Ultimately you want a painting that will look good from 6 to 20 feet away. You don't need to produce a masterpiece, so much as graphic art with strong, bold lines. Excessively fine detailing, especially when you are painting on cloth, as opposed to a base layer of paint can also bleed or look ragged, so try to avoid it.
As an advanced technique, before you start lining, you can try a bit of shading. Mix your color with a bit of darker or lighter paint to get a darker or lighter color. I've found that the following combinations work well:
| BASE | DARK COLOR | LIGHT COLOR |
| White | Blue | n/a |
| Red | Brown/Purple | Yellow |
| Yellow | Brown/Red | White |
| Green | Blue | Yellow |
| Blue | Dark Purple | White |
| Purple | Black | Red |
| Black | n/a | White |
| Brown | Black | Red/Yellow/White |
| Metallic Silver | Black | White |
| Metallic Gold | Brown | White/Yellow |
| Flesh Color | Brown | White |
| Grey | Black | White |
If you mix pure black with some colors the resulting dark shade looks "sad" or "muddy". Likewise, if you mix pure white with some colors the resulting color looks "washed-out." In heraldry you're trying to create the most vivid contrast possible and the greatest degree of color intensity so you want to avoid this.
If you want to get a "highlight" shade for your whites or a "shadow" shade for your blacks, then make the base "black" or "white" color a shade of gray. A nearly white or black gray looks "black" or "white" to they eye, but is still sufficiently light or dark that the pure color is still distinguishable as lighter or darker.
Once you've got your colors mixed, get a bare minimum on your flat 1/2" or 1/4" brush, and quickly swipe it over the area you want to shade so that just the raised areas of the fabric pick up paint. Acrylics being what they are, they want to dry quickly, so you can't blend your lighter or darker shades into your base shade very easily and it's hard to get shades to "fade" into each other. To counter this you "dry brush" using the texture of the fabric to pick up paint from your brush. Put just a bit of paint on the tip of your brush and then wipe the excess off on your palette or cleaning rag. Then quickly swipe your brush over the area you want to shade. The paint should just appear on the raised areas of the fabric. The more passes you make over a given area, the lighter or darker it will become.
Be careful not to overdo it. It's hard to undo shading and most charges don't need a lot of shading to be recognizable. Just do a suggestion of shadows and highlights, or just highlights. If you do go too far you can try to remove excess paint by rubbing the area with a moist rag or paper towel, but the results are less than perfect. You can also use this technique to "blend" areas slightly. Again, only work with one color at a time. Also, work from the "center" of the area that you want to shade (that is the area that need the deepest shadow or the greatest highlight) to the edges. If you've ever painted miniatures, models, or watercolors, then you already know this technique. Otherwise, practice on a scrap of fabric or paper until you get the hang of it.
Stay away from metallic paints. If you use them to cover large areas of cloth the banner looks weird, use white or yellow instead. If you have a metallic charge like a sword or goblet use yellow or light grey and use white for the highlights.
When you are painting details of charges (like straps on a horn or claws and teeth on an animal) a nice touch is to make them a different color from the base color of the charge. It's Period, it can improve identifiability of the charge, and it looks good. This is the one area where you can use metallic paints to good effect.
Oil paints were used in Period to paint banners. I have never used them to paint cloth. According to a friend of mine who has done so, they don't work very well. On all but the thickest cloth they bleed oil into the surrounding fabric over time which results in ugly stains. It's not Period, but I prefer acrylics for reasons of cost, safety and convenience.
Once your banner is completely painted and thoroughly dry. You can sew it.
Banners, Standards and Pennons - Sew the banner inside out, press the seams open on the inside using a steam iron, turn it right side out along a convenient seam, and then press the seams flat from the outside.
It is important that you press your seams so that they are crisp. The banner won't look right unless its seams are pressed and the banner itself has been ironed after it has been made.
Gonfannons - For gonfannons and other complex banners, sew the dags first, trim the seams, press the seams open, and turn them. Use a pencil or other long point object to make sure that the dags are fully turned. Then press the dags flat from the outside using a steam iron.
Now sew the small stabilizing piece on the back of the gonfannon.
Next sew the bottom seam of the "body" of the gonfannon, sewing the open tops of the dags into the seam so that the dags will be on the outside when the body is turned right side out.
Then mark and press your top seam so that it will be inside when the gonfannon is right side out. Sew the side seams almost all the way to the top, but not quite to the pressed top seam. Now turn the gonfannon right side out and press it. The dags should be on the outside, and the open top seam should lay flat.
Now make your hanging loops. These are identical pieces of just two thicknesses of cloth sewn along their long axis. Ideally their width and placement should mirror that of the dags at the bottom of the gonfannon. Sew them, turn them and press them flat. Fold them in half along the short axis. Carefully fit them and pin them into the open top seam of the gonfannon so that they form loops. It is important that the loops are all the same height above the body of the gonfannon, otherwise it won't hang right. Once everything is in place, carefully sew your final seam to catch the folded upper edge and the loops. This is the one visible seam in the entire project, so it should be done with a thread that matches the fabric.
Finally, using a very low heat so that you don't damage the paint, press the entire banner flat. This will make the banner lie flatter and set the acrylic paint into the fabric.
Acrylic paint that is well set into fabric is virtually impossible to remove. However, heavy layers of paint can become soft and be vulnerable to wrinkling or peeling if they get wet and the paint doesn't have a good surface to stick to. As a precaution, either hand wash your banners or wash them in cold water using a minimum of soap and a gentle wash cycle. Acrylic painted cloth can go through the dryer, but acrylic paint gets soft when it gets hot. Again, if you want to be cautious, consider just letting your banners drip dry or air dry after going through the spin cycle of the washer.
Pennon (banner illustration 1)
Banner (banner illustration 2)
Gonfannon (banner illustration 3)
Ottfried Neubecker, Heraldry: Sources, Symbols, and Meanings, Black Cat Books, 1988. ISBN 0-7481-0198-5
This book has dozens of illustrations of Period flags and other heraldic display.
Henry Bedingfeld and Peter Gwynn-Jones, Heraldry,Chartwell Books, 1993. ISBN 1-55521-932-2
Another good book with lots of illustrations of medieval heraldic display.
Thomas Woodcock and John Martin Robinson, The Oxford Guide to Heraldry, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988. ISBN 0-19-211658-4
Another good book with lots of pictures.
Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1989. ISBN 1-55584-400-6
The best single book on tournaments and tourneying in the Middle Ages. Lots of pictures of medieval heraldic display at tournaments.
Innes, Kim Anne (Mistress Andreanna Innes), Heraldic Display, Privately Printed; 1986. No ISBN
This pamphlet is an unofficial SCA publication. It is hard to find but well worth it. It is maddening in that it doesn't list its citations and its costume illustrations are taken from bad sources, but the text is excellent. It is the best treatment of how to do an appliqued banner that I have yet discovered.
In addition virtually any coffee table book on the Middle Ages or medieval warfare will have a fine selection of illuminations chock full of banners of various shapes and sizes.
There are also other SCA publications on heraldic display, notably Compleat Anachronist #55 Heraldic Display.