Military Insignia 3D: British Royal Navy & British Army

Military Insignia 3D’s British expansion continues. A logical conclusion to the Phase # 1 (Service Branches of the British Armed Forces) after I recreated emblems of Her Majesty's Armed Forces and the Royal Air Force, would be to round it up with the emblems/badges of the British Army and the Royal Navy (RN). While I had no problem with the fairly well-known British Army emblem, I have managed to hit a major roadblock with the RN emblem/badge.

This would probably be a good time to briefly explain how my Military Insignia 3D project works. In most cases, I already have a general idea of what would be my next phase of the project. Let’s say, for example, I decided to work on the insignia of U.S. Special Forces (SF). My next step would be the “research and development” stage, where I do just that – research and develop. I learn as much as I can about SF, their history, their structure, and their insignia. After the framework of the SF project is built, which would simply be a bunch of empty folders, divided into multiple categories and sub-categories, I move on to the stage # 2, where I would research and choose actual images of the insignia, which later would be used as reference materials for my designs. Consequently, I would fill up the empty folders as I went. Then I would move to the next stage, which would be preparing vector base with Illustrator CS5. After the vectors are ready, I would move to the next and final creative stage – turning the vectors into final 3D images, displayed all over this very blog. This stage would normally involve hours upon hours of Photoshop CS5 magic, powered by my very own M-LETT 3D method, (which happens to be my very own acronym for “Multi-Layer Enhancement & Texturizing Technique”).

So, getting back to the British Royal Navy emblem/badge, as you already know, I have hit the wall at the very beginning of my Research and Development stage. What IS an official RN badge or emblem? There are multiple known hat, blazer and lapel badges, pins and emblems, but none of them is THE badge. Of course, there is a blue corporate-looking RN logo, and one of the oldest RN symbols – The Naval Crown, but what about the RN Badge? After getting an absolute zero of help from British & Commonwealth Military Badge Forum, and spending hours researching the topic, I was back to square one. It very much appeared as the oldest navy of the Commonwealth, in fact, did not have an official emblem, while the rest of the younger and much smaller navies did. 


Help has arrived, (as it usually does, whenever it comes to Commonwealth insignia), from my good friend and insignia expert, creator and owner of the “Empire To Commonwealth” portal, Rev. B. Anthony Hathaway-Taylor. He has suggested, that the Naval Crown should indeed be considered an official (and the oldest) emblem of the British Royal Navy. After what I have learned at that point, I had to agree. 


Even though this is not your traditional “anchor + crown” combination, it was used by the RN, as well as most of the Commonwealth navies, mounted atop the shields of coats of arms of the naval vessels and other naval units. The Naval Crown (Latin: corona navalis), was a gold crown awarded to the first man who boarded an enemy ship during a naval engagement. In style, the crown was made of gold and surmounted with the prows of ships.


With this major decision out of the way, I have opted to combine two of the oldest images representing Royal Navy – a naval crown and a naval anchor, to create a Royal Navy emblem of my own. This, of course, was done in the past, so I cannot claim this as my original idea. However, the implementation was mine. You be the judge.

Royal Navy (RN)

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is therefore known as the Senior Service. From the 17th century until well into the 20th century it was the most powerful navy in the world, playing a key part in establishing the British Empire as the dominant world power.


After World War II the Royal Navy was replaced by the United States Navy as the world's foremost naval power. During the Cold War it was transformed into a primarily anti-submarine force, hunting for Soviet submarines, mostly active in the GIUK gap. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, its role for the 21st century has returned to focus on global expeditionary operations.


The Royal Navy is a blue-water navy and its ability to project power globally is considered second only to the U.S. Navy. As a prominent blue-water navy it operates an array of technologically sophisticated ships including an aircraft carrier, a helicopter carrier, landing platform docks, ballistic missile submarines, nuclear fleet submarines, guided missile destroyers, frigates, mine counter-measures and patrol vessels. The Royal Navy maintains the United Kingdom's nuclear weapons via its ballistic missile submarines.
The Royal Navy is a constituent component of the Naval Service, which also comprises the Royal Marines, Royal Naval Reserve and Royal Marines Reserve.

This badge is not official RN badge, bur rather an homage, created by me.

British Army 

The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England and Scotland and was administered by the War Office from London. It has been managed by the Ministry of Defence since 1964.


The full-time element of the British Army has also been referred to as the Regular Army since the creation of the reservist Territorial Force in 1908. 





The British Army is deployed in many of the world's war zones as part of both Expeditionary Forces and in United Nations Peacekeeping forces. 
All members of the Army swear (or affirm) allegiance to the monarch as commander-in-chief. However the Bill of Rights of 1689 requires Parliamentary consent for the Crown to maintain a standing army in peacetime. Parliament therefore annually approves the continued existence of the Army.
In contrast to the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and Royal Air Force, the British Army does not include Royal in its title. Many of the Army's constituent Regiments and Corps have been granted the "Royal" prefix and have members of the Royal Family occupying senior positions within some regiments.
The professional head of the British Army is the Chief of the General Staff.


As always, the above insignia is available on a number high quality products via my “Military Insignia” galleries exclusively from Zazzle.com. Simply follow the links in the article to navigate to the corresponding galleries.

I would also make my insignia designs available free of charge to any military units and personnel, to be used for the purpose of non-profit/non-commercial and charitable causes, benefiting troops and their families. Additionally, I would make my designs available free of charge to any military branches, formations and units for non-commercial internal duty-related purposes, such as web design, training materials or presentations, as I have done in the past on a number of occasions.


The above information provided in part by Empire to Commonwealth portal, Wikipedia and Royal Navy website.