looking for house crests

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "kbmum2000" <gullicksen at y...>
wrote:
> Wow, I definitely did not expect this much information!  You 
> mentioned there are differences between the movie version and the 
> accurate version.  How do you know what colors are accurate (such
> as the "H" in Hogwarts being purple instead of black)?

I hope Amanda can dig up better evidence for the H really being purple
than just how it was shown on WB merchandise before the first movie
(merchandise whose images were painted rather than photographed and
had their own errors, like blue jeans under the Hogwarts robes and
lumpy broomsticks), because so far I can't. Until you called it to my
attention, I hadn't realized that I was just *assuming* purple from
the purple wax seal on Harry's Hogwarts letter and the rationality of
the overall school not implying favoritism to one House by using its
color for the H.

My rant about the tinctures used for the wreaths and mantling is
simply based on the rules of RL heraldry, not on canon.

I didn't rant on the colors of the images and backgrounds of the four
Houses's arms, which most of the patches have kind of correct, but
there were some with purply backgrounds and a white instead of black
badger for Hufflepuff and a black raven instead of gold/silver/bronze
eagle for Ravenclaw. Canon about those colors is in GoF Chapter 15:

<<"When they went down to breakfast on the morning of the thirtieth of
October, they found that the Great Hall had been decorated overnight.
Enormous silk banners hung from the walls, each of them representing a
Hogwarts house – red with a gold lion for Gryffindor, blue with a
bronze eagle for Ravenclaw, yellow with a black badger for Hufflepuff,
and green with a silver serpent for Slytherin. Behind the teachers'
table, the largest banner of all bore the Hogwarts coat of arms: lion,
eagle, badger and snake united around a large letter "H".>>

However, here is a place where I am fairly willing to break with RL
heraldry: in RL heraldry, the background has to stay the same each
time the arms are depicted. A solid color cannot, for example, be
changed to stripes of that color plus white. But I *like* further
decorating the House arms by turning the solid-color backgrounds into
stripes or checkers or quarters as done in WB's art.