About Painted Sorority

Painted Sorority makes coats of arms for a line of sisters, a big and her little, a g-big, the twins who share a big, and prints them on canvas, fine-art paper, shirts, hoodies, throws, pillows, mugs and totes, in color or engraved for painting by hand. A line may adopt one of 29 crests drawn in the tradition the sororities took from the heralds, build one from what it holds to and what it loves, paint one from an archetype and its own words, or write a blazon outright. Every crest is new. None is the arms of any sorority, fraternity, honor society, nation or family.

The first American society with a Greek-letter name, Phi Beta Kappa, was founded at the College of William and Mary on 5 December 1776, and adopted its emblem at its first meeting: a silver medal that later grew a stem for winding a watch and became its key. The women's societies took up the same forms within a century. Kappa Alpha Theta was founded on 27 January 1870, and its ritual, badge and coat of arms, in Wikipedia's summary, “were influenced by those of Beta Theta Pi and Phi Gamma Delta.” The word came a few years later: the first organization to call itself a sorority was Gamma Phi Beta, in 1874.

The arms themselves arrived with the Victorian revival of heraldry. Kappa Alpha Theta's first were “designed by a firm in Indianapolis in 1877, drawn up at Alpha Chapter's insistence,” and standardised in 1907; in 1913 Pi Beta Phi became the L. G. Balfour Company's first sorority account. The shields, helms, mottoes and Greek letters on chapter-room walls today mostly descend from that generation, drawn to be engraved on stationery and printed in yearbooks.

Those arms, with each organization's name, letters, badge and motto, are its trademarks, and most are licensed through Affinity Consultants, one organization at a time. Many are reserved as well: “Most Greek lettered organizations reserve the crest for initiated members only,” in the words of the UC Santa Barbara fraternity and sorority office. Painted Sorority holds no license and prints none of them. The configurator checks the words a customer types against the names, letters and mottos of 144 organizations and stops when one matches.

What is left open, a court has named. When the Fifth Circuit upheld the injunction against the paddle maker Paddle Tramps in 2013, it recorded the district court's reasoning that the maker “could use fictional names.” The arms made here take that road: they are made for a line, not a national, and carry nothing a national owns.

Every drawn crest begins as a blazon, the compact language of arms the heralds of the thirteenth-century rolls already wrote in: tinctures, then the field's divisions, then the charges in order. The heraldry engine reads that blazon, checks it against the rule of tincture (no color laid on color, no metal on metal), and draws it as vector art at the full size of the print, so a star on a throw has the same clean edge as a star on a print. The suggestions for a line come from a table of values and interests, each charge carrying the meaning a named heraldry book gave it, John Guillim's of 1679 or Sloane-Evans's of 1854, and the configurator shows that reason beside every part.

The engraved option draws the same arms in ink, with the code the Jesuit Silvester Petra Sancta set down in his Tesserae Gentilitiae of 1638 so that an engraver could show color without it: dots for gold, upright lines for red, level lines for blue. It is the way arms were printed when they were printed at all, and it leaves the color to the hand that paints it.

A crest painted from a line's own words is different. An image model paints it, from a prompt that asks for a herald's painting in the manner of a fifteenth-century roll of arms, and the request is moderated before it runs. It will not paint any organization's letters, crest or badge.

The arms made here are assumed arms: a design a line takes up as its own, with no grant and no national behind it. Strictly, a crest is the figure on the helm above the shield; this site uses the word as most people do, for the whole coat of arms.

An honest note on the hand. A herald's painter works with a brush and decades of practice, and a drawing made by code from a blazon does not carry that hand. What it carries is the rule: every crest sold here could be blazoned back, word for word, by anyone who knows the language. The engraved print is there for the line that wants a hand in it after all.

Some emblems belong to living peoples and are not ours to sell: Northwest Coast crest art, Māori moko and carving, Hawaiian and Anishinaabe designs, and the adinkra symbols of the Akan. The configurator refuses them, including when asked in words.

The gallery also leaves out the charges single sororities are known by: the lamp, the torch, the anchor, the key, the crescent and the fleur-de-lis among them. A customer may still draw one, and the configurator says whose symbol it may be read as before the order is placed.

Painted Sorority by Painted.App. Every order is sold and shipped by PaintedApp, LLC, 1327 SE Tacoma St #394, Portland, OR 97202. Paper and canvas are printed to order by Prodigi; shirts, hoodies, throws, pillows, mugs and totes by Printful; and payment runs through Stripe. Write support@painted.app about anything, from a misprinted corner to a question about a charge.