About Painted Crest

Painted Crest makes coats of arms for families and prints them on canvas, fine-art paper, shirts, hoodies and blankets. A family may adopt one of 81 crests drawn from the colours and charges of 31 nations, build one from where it came from and what it does, describe one in its own words, or write a blazon outright. Every crest is new. None is a recorded coat of arms, and national and sovereign arms, such as the harp of Ireland and the castle of Castile, are left out of the gallery on purpose.

Every drawn crest begins as a blazon, the compact language of arms the heralds of the thirteenth-century rolls already wrote in: tinctures, then the field's divisions, then the charges in order. The heraldry engine reads that blazon, checks it against the rule of tincture (no colour laid on colour, no metal on metal), and draws it as vector art at the full size of the print, so a lion on a blanket has the same clean edge as a lion on a print. The suggestions for a family come from a table of national colours, field patterns and charges, each with the reason it was chosen, and the configurator shows that reason beside every part.

A crest painted from a family's own words is different. An image model paints it, from a prompt that asks for a herald's painting in the manner of a fifteenth-century roll of arms, and the request is moderated before it runs.

A coat of arms belongs to a person, not a surname. The College of Arms puts it plainly: “There is no such thing as a ‘coat of arms for a surname’.” The arms made here are assumed arms: a design a family takes up as its own, as families have for centuries, with no grant behind it. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland a grant comes from the College of Arms, which charges £9,600 from 1 January 2026; in Scotland, from the Court of the Lord Lyon. A design made here is a reasonable thing to bring to either.

An honest note on the hand. A herald's painter works with a brush and decades of practice, and a drawing made by code from a blazon does not carry that hand. What it carries is the rule: every crest sold here could be blazoned back, word for word, by anyone who knows the language.

Some emblems belong to living peoples and are not ours to sell: Northwest Coast crest art, Māori moko and carving, Hawaiian and Anishinaabe designs, and the adinkra symbols of the Akan. The configurator refuses them, including when asked in words.

Painted Crest by Painted.App. Every order is sold and shipped by PaintedApp, LLC, 1327 SE Tacoma St #394, Portland, OR 97202. Paper and canvas are printed to order by Prodigi, shirts, hoodies and blankets by Printful, and payment runs through Stripe. Write support@painted.app about anything, from a misprinted corner to a question about a charge.