Y'all may remember me from my post a few weeks back about designing a coat of arms. Well, here I am, with the finished product! I will freely admit that I did not draw most of these elements - the only ones that I made are the ring, and the animal silhouettes in the bottom right corner (traced from clipart, so kinda not original either.) So, I'm not taking art credit here, and I want to make that clear. Most of the elements were drawn by the amazing Sodacan on Wikipedia, who draws beautiful coats of arms. I would have drawn everything myself, if I had any art skills at all.
Which I don't.

What I WILL take credit for, however, is the design and arrangement.

This is where it started:


I eventually expanded this tiny sketch into a larger (though not much better) sketch:


I loved the way this was looking, but I obviously do not have the art skills to draw this myself. So I formulated a plan: I knew that I could download the original SVGs from sodacan's coats of arms on Wikipedia (which I already knew of, I've used his art as wallpapers before) and dissemble them. I have no plans to sell this or anything along those lines, ever - it's simply a gift for my grandparents, so copyright is not a concern. So, I decided to find the elements I needed and assemble them to fit my design. Only one problem: I had literally no idea how to use inkscape. Never one to let a little thing like total inability stop me, I opened a tab so I could google "how to (insert any step here) in inkscape" and set off.
Did I mention that I only had 6 days to do this, to design it, find my elements, and assemble them, starting from not knowing how to use my software? Because yeah.
All things considered, I'm pretty damn proud of how this turned out. The motto at the bottom says (roughly) "Strong together, by the grace of God" in what I really, really hope is grammatically correct Latin. But seeing as I'm the only one in the family that kinda speaks Latin, and I even I don't know if it's right or not, I don't think anyone will notice if my grammar's not perfect

Wow! I've never seen a coat of arms quite like that. It's not something I know a lot about, but I've seen a few messages in this forum, over the years, from people who are making their own.

I've always had the impression they are just completely flat. But this one seems to have a lot of depth to it. Interesting!

Nice work! Did you have a ancient model to choose the elements?