[HPFGU-Movie] Re: Color (Colour) question

[Amanda Geist]

> On Sat, 13 Jul 2002, shelaghcol wrote:
>
> > What are the actual house colors for each house?

Vicki answered

> Gryffindor is actually red and gold, and the reds used in the movie were
> darker, towards maroon, than towards orange.  Slytherin is green and
> silver, with no shade of green specified, though everyone seems to
> associate Slytherin with darker greens.
>
> > What are Hufflepuff's and Ravenclaw's colors?
>
> Hufflepuff is black and yellow, and Ravenclaw is blue and bronze.
>
> I believe for any of these, your best reference for colors is to check out
> official illustrations for each of the houses' crests.

I will not go into my heraldic rant about the incorrect usage of the word
"crest" here; nobody wants to hear that.

Vicki is partly correct. To amplify, there is a difference between the
colors on a coat of arms and any associated livery, the latter being
identifying colors worn by a noble's household or by a group. The shades of
the liveries are usually not precisely the colors on the armory. Armorial
colors, those used on coats of arms, are bright and primary and bold. Livery
colors are often more understated versions of those bright heraldic colors.

So I'm listing both, the colors of the House coats, which are properly the
House "colors" when you use the term, and the House liveries (if you can
call scarves and ties liveries), which are what the students *wear.* [For
example, if you were decorating your room in Gryffindor's colors, you should
use red and gold/yellow (Heraldically, gold = bright yellow and silver =
white). But if you're knitting a Gryffindor scarf, you should use maroon and
golden yellow.]

Gryffindor's coat of arms bears a gold lion on red. The livery colors looked
to be maroon and golden yellow.

Slytherin bears a silver snake on green (heraldic greens are bright Kelley
green). Their livery looked to be a less enthusiastic but still true green
and white.

Ravenclaw bears a golden eagle on blue. I know, it's described as bronze,
but heraldically it would also be considered gold. I never looked close
enough in the movie to tell, but I'm betting they have a less golden, more
rusty yellow and a darker shade of blue than on the coat.

Hufflepuff, for no reason I can fathom, was altered. If you look closely at
the Hogwarts coat of arms (which combines all four Houses' coats), you'll
see that for some obscure reason they have changed the badger to
white/silver. ?? Ugh. They took this lovely design of a black badger on a
gold field, and made it white on gold. This is called Low Contrast--hard to
see from any distance away--and if their scarves are similarly white and
yellow, I repeat, Ugh. They *should* be black and yellow, but I don't know
that we saw any Hufflepuff students close up enough to know what they did
with them in the movie.

It gets confusing, because the liveries of the Houses are not very different
from their armorial colors. In actual usage, livery colors often had nothing
to do with the colors on a coat of arms, they'd just be what a particular
noble or king liked (as opposed to the colors on his coat, which he
inherited and had no say about). With the Houses, though, they are so very
close that the same words can be used for them unless you're getting very
techical about shades.

Now aren't you all glad I didn't run on and on about heraldry?

--Amanda Binns