Happy Little Trees: Painting Tartans

I've been asked by a couple people how I painted the tartans on my trolls and how I picked the colors and patterns that make them up. When I decided to undertake this initially, I won't lie, I was intimidated. I was totally tempted to just go the route of colored sash wearing trollkin and call it a day. A lot of it too was laziness on my part. I imagined they were very time consuming but my dear ole' dad's bit of advice lead me to do it. The advice was: "You aren't supposed to rush hobbies; You're doing this for enjoyment and to create something that you take pride in. Why speed through it?" I don't think I could put it better; however, painting the tartans will become second nature after a little practice and will make your trollkin look awesome!

I strongly suggest to go to Google, pop "tartans" into the search box and look at what pops up under images. Literally hundreds of patterns will appear before your eyes. This is where you will want to decide on your line layout and your end target. I came up with my own color scheme and line layout (or I accidentally recreated an existing one without knowing it). It is totally okay to dumb down one of the traditional patterns, in that this will be on a miniature and even a simple version will look great.

Colors(Left to Right): P3 Beaten Purple, Iosan Green, Frostbite

First step is to pick that base color. You want your tartans to pop on your model, so that means choose a color that is directly contrasting to your armor color or the predominate color on your models. If you are using a metallic for armor, silver is usually bluish and bronze/copper is in the red family. My trolls have orange armor, so I chose purple. After painting a couple models with the purple scheme, I also decided that some future models will use a green tartan pattern that you will see to the right of the purple scheme. The bluish scheme to the far right was just me playing around. 

In the picture above, the smaller lines on the bottom is what you will see and actually paint on the model's tartan and boxes on top are what the tartans would look like if they were unfolded. I'm doing this so you can see why I put lines where they are on the model's tartan and I strongly suggest you do this little exercise prior to attempting it on a model. Lay a base coat on the tartan and shade it, so it looks like a colored sash.

Colors(Left to Right): P3 Ironhull Grey, Cryx Bane Base, Exile Blue

Step two is to paint broad vertical stripes as in the above picture. The color should be darker than the base tartan color. Usually a darker shade of the base color works, like the green scheme above but grey seems to work for just about any.

Colors(Left to Right): P3 Ironhull Grey, Cryx Bane Base, Exile Blue

In step three, I use the same color to make horizontal broad stripes. This step is where you will see your pattern begin to emerge. 

Colors(Left to Right): P3 Menoth White Base, Underbelly Blue, Murderous Magenta

Step four, aka The Hard Part, requires a thin brush, a steady hand and patience. Choose a color that will stick out from your base color. You probably want to pick anything that will be visible to be honest. The layout of these lines is completely up to you. On my purple scheme I decided to make the small lines doubled and on the green they are just single lines. You will notice that most of the time, you will not actually see these secondary lines bisect on the model.

Colors(Left to Right): P3 Heartfire, Khador Red Highlight, Necrotite Green

The final step is to choose a color that is nice and bright. This last color is the one that will make you say "wow." It is import to make it completely contrast your base color. As you can see on the blue example all the way on the right, I used green which is close to blue on the color chart. It doesn't have the same effect that a yellow, orange or red would have had. Once the color is chosen, paint the squares in the middle of the crosses that your first broad stripes created. Viola! Tartans!

While doing the last step, if you feel that some of the little squares are too bright just use a black wash and dull them out a bit. 

I also noticed that my green tartan has one thing I need to change. My little squares are orange and  my armor color is orange. You will want to avoid this, trust me; it won't look right. I will most likely use Menoth White Base for them. 

I hope this has been helpful and I will always answer questions. Enjoy.