The line drawings of the various shields in my copy of the Display of Heraldry have been painted at some time in the past 400 years. Whilst it is not unusual to find that owners of heraldry books have not been able to resist the temptation to add colour to black and white illustrations, I believe that in this case the colouring was done fairly early on. The pigments used appear to be fairly primitive; in particular, the blues and greens clearly pre-date the development of synthetic dyes, being made of powdered minerals suspended in some form of gluey medium. I hope to get confirmation of this from an expert source.
Unfortunately, the viscous nature of the blue paint made it difficult for the painter to deal with fine details, and in some places the result has been rather untidy. Where this has happened I have been assisted by Marianne Perdomo Machin of the Academy of St. Gabriel, who has expertly retouched, and in some cases completely redrawn, the affected examples. I have used "alternative text", visible when the mouse pointer hovers over the image, to indicate that this has been done.
All images were scanned using a Primax Colorado at 200 dpi resolution. The resulting BMP files were converted to JPG and the contrast and brightness enhanced for optimum appearance on screen. They were then resized, sharpened and converted to transparent GIF files for loading to the web site. Paint Shop Pro version 6 was used for this.
Caution should be exercised when viewing the coloured images, as it is apparent that the painter lacked some heraldic expertise and made a small number of errors in depicting the examples as described in the text. Where possible, these have been corrected, but the coloured frontispiece includes a number of shields which have not been painted correctly.