Don, herald extrodinaire of Stormhold, was kind enough to send me a pic of a period wreath but of course that's at work and not here . Period wreathes appear to be dipicted in the round rather than the way that we do them. You can see this in a few other applications:
C6th Italian Coin ;)
Early C16th Italian
Early C16th Italian
Unfortunately, the wreathes in a circular form kinda doesn't work on a rectangular shape when it has another item inside it - so I've used the inspiration of the wreathes to beef it up the laurel wreathes, make them more rounded in shape and to avoid individual leaves. (I like this part because I don't have much time to paint individual leaves on wreathes for 8 banners on both sides....) So they're kinda blended beefy wreathy goodness....
Saturday I spent the day drawing up wreathes of different sizes, making templates of all the various elements of the devices on cardboard (so I use the same templates for the GNW banner project... which I'll start after festival). It's really important to me to have the wreathes as a common link between all the banners because I think those sorts of visual links are important. So the St Florian/River Haven wreathes are the same (above), the Baccus Wood/Willoughbyvale ones are the same (below).
Sunday I managed to paint two banners: St Florian and Bacchus Wood (the simple ones!) And then I got through a quarter of the River Haven one and stuffed it. (boo!) I've just finished Willoughbyvale's tonight.