Barrel Carving: Coat of Arms / Family Crest with Full Achievement

Description

If you are new to heraldic art or considering a coat of arms carving for the first time, we highly recommend you first read our blog article on the topic.  It includes some important caveats about using and adapting family crests that may be important if you are a purist about heraldic art – or you live in Scotland where heraldic rules are still enforced.  Also check out our coat of arms / family crest gallery for many more examples.

If your coat of arms is of the “full achievement” style – i.e. with knight’s helmut (aka helm), shield (aka escutcheon), and side “supporter” flourishes then you can probably use this product page to customize and order your coat of arms carving.  Scottish clans use a different base design that features a belt – as described in the article above.

What mainly differentiates one full achievement style coat of arms from another is: 1) the family-specific symbols and emblems on the shield, 2) the family-specific symbol worn on the top (or crest) of the knight’s helmet (which is the original meaning of the often-misused term “family crest“), 3) one or two banners with the family name, country name and/or motto and 4) sometimes specific colors on the above.  The rest of the armor and flourishes around the sides of the shield are often pretty arbitrary.  Many providers of family crest artwork on the internet will use the very same full achievement design for all families.  Conversely you will see many minor variants of full achievements for the same family from different sources.

Our philosophy is not that of a purist.  We have you choose one of our standard heraldic 3d coat of arms models (aka a “full acheivement”) as a starting point for your carving. We then prepare carvable family-specific artwork for the shield, crest and banners from artwork you supply, and add minimal paint to those elements per your direction.  You can optionally add 2d or 3d border carvings, plus additional text carvings around the central coat of arms carving.

As you can see from our gallery we have produced many other variants of heraldic style carvings – e.g. multiple coats of arms on one barrel head, coats of arms not carved on a barrel head, whimsical coats of arms designed together with our customers, etc.   So…  if this product page is too limiting for what you have in mind, just contact us and we’ll work with you to realize your vision.

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