Sorry for the delay. In answer to your questions - I am sorry for the confusion I may have caused here. All I want here is a shield that I can place designs on the front of. The rest of the shield may be coloured as you see fit using any additional textures that you feel are needed. I just need black around the edges so that the textures that I develop, do not have an obvious black border.
I currently have over 120 separate graphics elements that I intend to combine (not all at once '> ) to create different shield designs. I have a palette of colours that I have adapted so that I can easily use them from within greenfish icon editor (I put a link in the tools thread a while ago). That looks like -
These are the colours that The Institute of Heraldry (a US armed forces department) uses. Additionally I have adapted a graphic that I found via google into 4 tileable patterns so that I have the option of heraldic ermine. The white one of which looks like -
I primarily made my base graphics to work best in greenfish but I am not averse to using other tools to achieve the look I want. As an example I took this -
and this -
and created this -
with a little adjustment of my base textures.
Hope that helps to clear up any confusion.
TR