Gules Field Blazon

Livewelly

About this app

A blazon is a coat of arms written down. It is a real language with a fixed grammar: name the field, then whatever is laid across it, then the charges upon it, each with its number and its tincture. Read the sentence and exactly one shield can be drawn from it. Gules Field Blazon teaches you to read that sentence, and then to speak it.

Every shield in this app is drawn from a parsed description rather than from a picture file. The grammar and the image are the same object seen two ways, so what you see can never drift away from the words that describe it.

WHAT IS INSIDE

GLOSSARY. Every term the app reads, each with its own small shield drawn beside it: the two metals and the five colours, the furs ermine and vair with their real patterns, the divisions of the field, the lines of partition, the honourable ordinaries with their diminutives, and about twenty charges from the lion rampant to the garb. Search it, or filter it by family of term.

READ. A shield is drawn and you assemble its blazon one term at a time, in the order a blazon names things. A wrong choice is answered with the term that was right and the reason it is right, never with a bare cross.

BUILD. A free builder. Choose a field, cut it, lay an ordinary across it, add charges, and watch the shield and its written blazon change together. The rule of tincture is checked as you go. You can also type a blazon of your own and have it drawn; anything the reader cannot understand comes back with the exact word it stopped on and the reason it stopped there.

DRILL. Timed rounds that mix both directions at random: a written blazon to the shield it describes, and a shield to the blazon that reads it. Every term you meet is counted toward your record.

PROGRESS. Mastery bars for each family of terms, a drawn line of your accuracy round by round, and a list of the terms you have been getting wrong.

THE RULE OF TINCTURE

Metal is not placed on metal, nor colour on colour. The app applies the rule where it belongs and says plainly where it does not: furs count as neither metal nor colour, and a charge lying across a field that is already divided is exempt by long usage. You are told which case you are in, and why.

HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT TEACHES

This app teaches the classical English convention of blazon. Other traditions differ, and differ in ways that matter. Every shield here is invented for study; nothing in it is the arms of any real person, family, institution or state, and the app makes no claim about who may lawfully bear arms anywhere.

NO STRINGS

It works entirely offline and asks for no internet permission at all. No adverts. No analytics. No accounts. No sound of any kind, anywhere in the app: the feedback is what you see, plus an optional short vibration you can switch off. Your progress is kept on your own device and survives closing the app.