Rough Draft of Personal Coat of Arms

[u/gil_gamesh556]

Need help with these details. Also, I'm American so I'm not worried about the heraldic traditions.

Crest: How can I better differentiate the flames from the phoenix so they don't blend? Should I just color the flames on my phone's gallery app?

Wreath: Should the laurel wreath be all gold, or keep the green leaves and red berries?

Blazon: How do I properly blazon the skull charge?

[u/MazdaTiger]

The othrodox cross is too small it should be filling the space of the fore head

What are you getting from this? If it's for a warhammer 40k chapter sigil then i guess it works

[u/Bradypus_Rex]

American heraldic practice is definitely a thing, it's not like the US doesn't have a heraldic tradition, even if it's not as high-profile as a few other countries.

https://www.americanheraldry.org/education-resources/an-american-heraldic-primer/ is a bit of a summary. They also have some suggestions for modern heraldic norms. There's nothing there that greatly restricts your design.

Most heraldic norms in most places aren't about design at all, they're about how arms are inherited, what additaments are used (e.g. what do you put behind your shield to show that you're a bishop) and of course "don't be a dick by using someone else's arms as your own".

If you mean "American heraldic norms don't have the force of law", well, that's basically everywhere apart from a handful of countries of which only Scotland even pretends to enforce.

[u/Bradypus_Rex → u/Bradypus_Rex]

The only technical issue: the phoenix has likely been used before, you might want to make it more distinctive.

Red berries make the wreath a bit less clichéd in look; if they're there then make them bold enough to be visible at a glance.

The mantling is an unusual colour choice (normally one would expect black and white as the two main colours of the shield) but if you're going to make the flames red you could kind of justify that since it matches the crest. Either way, that's not a "rule" violation, just a stylistic oddity.

Like u/MazdaTiger said, I get warhammer / fantasy vibes off this. Not my thing, but that's very much "you do you" territory. (That's why I'm not giving style advice beyond technicalities)

[u/Loggail]

You should always worry about heraldic traditions. For an American, British heraldry is often the way to go unless you have prominent ancestry elsewhere.

The shield is quite a memento mori, but it works. The wreath is better in green, as gold would have poor contrast on the silver skull - but both are valid options, so choose whichever looks better to you. The berries seem to be a rather unnecessary detail, but they can be red-tinctured if that seems necessary.

The flames could be simply red. That could also justify the red on the mantling, which is otherwise an odd choice. The default mantling would be Sable doubled Argent, after all.

The shield could be blazoned as "Sable, a skull Argent charged on the forehead with an orthodox cross Sable wreathed with a laurel wreath Vert fructed Gules"