Field (heraldry)
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In heraldry
Heraldry
Heraldry is the profession, study, or art of creating, granting, and blazoning arms and ruling on questions of rank or protocol, as exercised by an officer of arms. Heraldry comes from Anglo-Norman herald, from the Germanic compound harja-waldaz, "army commander"...

, the background of the shield is called the field. The field is usually composed of one or more tincture
Tincture (heraldry)
In heraldry, tinctures are the colours used to emblazon a coat of arms. These can be divided into several categories including light tinctures called metals, dark tinctures called colours, nonstandard colours called stains, furs, and "proper". A charge tinctured proper is coloured as it would be...

s (colours or metal
Metal
A metal , is an element, compound, or alloy that is a good conductor of both electricity and heat. Metals are usually malleable and shiny, that is they reflect most of incident light...

s) or furs. The field may be divided
Division of the field
In heraldry, the field of a shield can be divided into more than one area of different tinctures, usually following the lines of one of the ordinaries and carrying its name...

 or may consist of a variegated pattern
Variation of the field
In heraldry, variations of the field are any of a number of ways that a field may be covered with a pattern, rather than a flat tincture or a simple division of the field.- Patterning with ordinaries and subordinaries :...

.

In rare modern cases the field (or a subdivision thereof) is not a tincture, but is shown as a scene from a landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...

. Landscape fields are regarded by many heralds as unheraldic and debased, as they defy the heraldic ideal of simple, boldly coloured images and cannot be consistently drawn from blazon
Blazon
In heraldry and heraldic vexillology, a blazon is a formal description of a coat of arms, flag or similar emblem, from which the reader can reconstruct the appropriate image...

.

The arms of Count Cesare Fani http://www.armorial-register.com/arms-it/count-cesare-fani.html are along the same lines, as the field is blazoned as "sky proper." The arms of the Inveraray and District Community Council in Scotland have as a field In waves of the sea. The correct language of heraldry is almost infinitely flexible and virtually any image may be blazoned in a correct manner, for example "sky proper" might be blazoned simply Azure, whilst "waves of the sea" might be blazoned correctly as Azure, 3 bars undee argent which would provide 3 wavy thick white lines on a blue field.
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