User:Ashoppio/sodacan

Royal arms of England. One of the first sodacan style coats of arms.

The Sodacan Style (Alternatively known as Sodacanism or Wikimedia/Wikipedia Style) is a SVG style of coats of arms, created by English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons user Sodacan, that goes back as 2009.

It is universally used in many wikipedias around Wikimedia. It is used for every type of heraldry: Royal, civic and ecclesiastical heraldry. It is used by more than 30 users on Wikimedia projects only, making the style very easy to recreate and emulate. As it is based on SVG images, it is easy to reuse sodacan style assets directly from the coats of arms, making it suitable to be used by new artists.

Sodacanism is often associated with the style of WappenWiki and the style of the french heraldic project, though the former cannot be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons, and the second is generally disliked by the heraldic community by being too oversimplified.

This page aims to explain the lore of Sodacanism and some tips when drawing in it for the newer artists and heraldists. This page contains videos that can be reached with the "v" group of notes. This page is mainly managed by Ashoppio, but external help is appreciated, such as additional videos. If this page miss something you need, lemme know in my talk page or on discord (ashoppio).

Tutorials on Sodacanism

First of all

Check SaluteVII's sodacan assets page for some quick and useful assets such as the palettes and useful charges.

Sodacanism is best used with Inkscape, as it is the program used by Sodacan himself and used by the majority of artists.

Try to avoid single SVG elements for searching. They are usually not in the Sodacan style (except for very common ones) and are instead in the PB style.

Colors

Download this and this, they will be very useful for creating sodacan CoAs. Usually, for the field of the shield you should follow this guide.

For specific tincture for charges that are proper, this is a good palette to start with.

Which software to use?

For heraldry novices the best software and simplest while having many complex feature is Heraldicon, free, without ads and work very well to create both simple shields and full achievements. Heraldicon though has some problems for Sodacan style and Commons especially. Heraldicon doesn't support proper sodacan shading, there is a sodacan palette, but only a color out of the 3 shadings of it is correct. Heraldicon also has a strange way of making its SVG's, they can be made by masks or clips, but are very busy speaking of layers. Note also that Heraldicon cannot put the color of the border as a darker hue of the figure (as every charge in the sodacan style), but only blank or transparent. Overall, Heraldicon is good for starters, but as you are going to become better at creating coat of arms and SVG coats of arms, Inkscape is the best way.

Software I do not recommend for coats of arms on commons and sodacanism as a whole are Armoria, Drawshield, Canva and any raster drawing program.

How to change the tincture of an asset quickly

Be sure that you have the sodacan color palette in your document. On Inkscape, select with the node tool the lightest shade of the asset. Then, go to "edit", "select same" and do fill color. Then click "D" or select the color picker and select the color.

How to put your creations in your user page

A good thing to flex showing humbly in your page are your creations. Many users opt to have a small presentation in the incipit, put some templates, and show their work using galleries, divided by headings and subheadings. Good gallery should be centered with this script in the CSS classes square: text-align: center; and have 6 images per row.

Another thing many other users do is to put their coat of arms on top of their page, with a template like this:

	ASHOPPIONE

This is the same template used by Sodacan, and it is used by some other artists. Adding your coat of arms to commons isn't a problem, just put it in the Coats of arms of users category and you should be alright. Only note that the font must be manually added in the textual editor, because when you copy the template with the visual editor it doesn't copy the font.

How to put attribution for coat of arms used

It is very common to use other people coat of arms for taking assets, most sodacan-style coat of arms have the CC-BY-SA license, which obliges that you must upload your work with the same license and attributing the creator. On commons it is quite easy, you just have to insert in your description this template: {{attrib|image.svg}} and you are done.

If you made an asset yourself, it is good that you describe it in the description of your file.

How to categorize your images

Categorizing is good to help other users search for your assets and to make your files better. In the first place, you shouldn't put categories like "Coats of arms" and "Heraldry", you should be more specific: In the first place, you should put "SVG coats of arms of <subdivision type> of <place>", then put the name of the coat of arms subject in the category, and then put the charges in your coat of arms.

How to "sodacanize" something

When you can't find a sodacan-style asset, you can sodacanize it yourself. To do this, you can select the path you want to sodacanize, then duplicate it, and then intrude the duplicate.

Mind that for smaller assets (like a small star) just 2 layers of shading are good, thus for bigger charges (like a lion supporter) it is better to make 4 or more layers of shading.

Mind that there are different ways of "sodacanizing" something, the method shown before its a flat sodacanizing, usually a more quality one would be to make the shading more dynamic, especially for very detailed assets like animals.^{[video needed]}

How to change the size of your page

In case you want to add/remove a crown or something else, or the page is bugged and the size of it when you export is like 9995000x9999900:

After you added/removed your asset, go to page properties, and click the button after "Resize to Content". In case this doesn't work correctly for the very big page bug, create a rectangle covering your coat of arms entirely, then go to page properties while the rectangle is selected and click resize to content again. After this, close the exporting panel and re-open it, now you can export.

How to search for assets

Sodacanism is based on finding another person thing and remixing it. This is why it expanded so quickly and it is so popular.

There are two ways to find a sodacan style asset, the first is to search on the user page or user uploads of sodacan artists, that can be seen on the template you are seeing. The users page that are best to find assets are of MostEpic, Ashoppio, Regicollis, Sodacan, Heralder and Euryrel.

The second way and more precise one is finding by category, just search on commons (or internet directly) for:

X in Heraldry and search by eye the coat of arms that are in SVG and are in the sodacan style. If you can't find any in the first page, use the subcategories, if you still can't find anything, you may do something yourself.

Clipping

Clipping is an useful feature in Inkscape. It basically acts as a mask not only for single path (in which it is possible to cut using features like fracturing), but also for groups of paths.

Clipping is used for counterchanging a charge, fitting a single charge (like an hill from the point of the shield or a sun in the chief) in the shield or fitting every charge on the screen.

Note that the last method is not reliable anymore. Most coats of arms using the clipping feature heavily are usually very heavy, arriving to even 12 megabytes, and recently Wikimedia SVG renderer often shows "transparent" coats of arms.

How to fit a partition or division in the shield

Instead of clipping, a more lightweight and stable way of fitting a figure in the shield is using the fracture feature. Select the path and the fill path of the shield, and click fracture. Then remove the remainings.

If you don't want to use clipping but have an asset like a sea, a counterchanged lion, a hill or a grass base or any other charge that is probably made by another person, check this.

How to create a charge

Mainly, there are two ways to create a charge. The first (and easiest) is to adapt two or more already existing sodacan charges in one, or manually draw on another sodacan charge. The second is to draw/trace from scratch. The tips from the "How to sodacanize something" section are valid also here.

Tips for Italian Heraldry

Don't use this. Use this or this. Good pages to follow for operazioni araldiche are Armoriali, if you need any help either contact me on my it.wiki page or ask on the laboratorio grafico or for more heraldic questions ask to the Progetto:Araldica talk page.

How to delete an EDP file

Click the EDP file, modify the EDP template and put the name of your file (usually MunicipalityName-Stemma.svg), and then publish your changes. To be sure that the file is going to be deleted, be sure that after you put your SVG version of the file is on the template and in the "Simboli" section the original copyrighted file must be in 0 pages, then it can be cancelled.

How to create a gonfalon

Gonfalons are basically flags. To create one, you can take Arrow303's very good and lightweight gonfalons templates, take the coat of arms, create the divisions and the colors, and put the coat of arms in the center. Then, search for another gonfalon (from the same author of the original template) to copy the ornaments.

Then put the text: Use either a Bodoni or a Times New Roman font, be sure that the border of the text is less dark than the text fill color. Then, create an ellipse on top of the coat of arms, select the text and the ellipse and go to "text" and select "text on path", move the text to the center by clicking space, and do some fixing by adjusting the spacing.