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Hi everyone, here's another Cat Critter I completed this week, DSM8006 Scottish Wildcat Warrior. This two-part 28mm pewter model was sculpted by Dave Summers for Dark Sword Miniatures. I glued the hand holding the sword before painted it. I hope you will like it as much as it was a joy to paint.

02243: Robert O'Mannon sculpted by Bobby Jackson. Some time ago I said I would post a step-by-step of a tartan being painted. I've done the photos and here they are: Tartan Step by Step

I've been working on painting tartan a bit (Ian MacAndrew Show Off) A while ago I said I would post a step-by-step of painting a tartan(Painting Tartan). So here it is: 02243 Robert O'Mannon sculpted by Bobby Jackson. I started by deciding what colour tartan I would paint. On the last project I used the Afghanistan Memorial Tartan ( Tartan reference material ) but changed the blue to green and left off some of the highlight colours. I've found that most patterns of tartan are really far too complicated for me to attempt to paint, so I pick out one that I can simplify into easily painted elements. These elements often combine multiple lines from the original tartan into a single line of a similar colour. The result is a pattern that suggests a tartan but without having to paint a lot of very fine lines. Painting very long, fine lines is the particular challenge of painting tartan, so the fewer you can get away with the better. So for this project I decided to use the same tartan pattern again, but to keep the blue colour and to add in the red and white lines. This is risky because the white lines in particular can be very hard to paint smoothly and they stick out like a sore thumb when they are messy. Mistakes will be highly visible, as you will see. Another consideration for selection of the tartan and the colour of tartan is the overall composition of the final miniature. The very fine lines can be hard to notice, so adding a similar colour elsewhere on the miniature can help make the colour more easily noticed. This is why I painted Robert's hair red and his amulet blue. Step 1: Draw out the main lines for the pattern and select the colours. I also test painted a swatch of the pattern. From this I knew that the blue would need to have the intersection squares painted in darker or it wouldn't look right.

I needed to paint a tartan. The miniature and the reason are here: 02178 Knight Templar with Royal MacKenzie Tartan Painting a tartan in detail would be very hard. Here is the source material picture I worked from. Most of the tutorials I looked at involved painting a black grid and then painting in each square individually. I'm too lazy, was in too much of a hurry and don't have the quality of eyesight for that. My daughter who is a highland dancer and water colour painter helped me figure it out. We figured out which of the lines of the tartan would actually be visible at arm’s reach. Then we worked out which colours are forming those lines. Tartans aren't generally composed of stripes of solid colours. The colours come from the mixing of two colours of wool interwoven. So, we worked out which two colours were involved in each stripe. For example, red and green give you brown. So, by putting a stripe of green glaze over red basecoat, I get a brown stripe. If I put a second green stripe over the red at a 90 degree angle, I get another brown stripe, but where the two cross I get a green square with crisp corners. I put a thinned dot of the green in the middle of that square to deepen the green colour, and voila, a cross hatch of brown stripes and green squares on red. Then I sketched a map of it, noting that the tartan is not a perfectly spaced grid, and selected colours which when added together will produce the colours needed. The map: This proved to be still too difficult to paint clearly, so the number of thin lines was further reduced for simplicity. I started with a red basecoat and gave it minimal highlighting and shading. Then I started with one black line running parallel to the characters belt, midway between hem and belt. This is marked on the photo below. This gave me the line from which to measure out and place all the other lines. After that it was, in order: - green horizontal stripes - green vertical stripes - enhance green squares - black lines. The lines in the source material are not actually black, they are sets of black lines and blue lines. So each black line was traced over with blue as well to tone it down a bit and give a slight blue hue. It may not seem like much, but the before and after change was remarkable. Then the very thin yellow lines, with paint thinned somewhat. Finally a yellow dot at the intersection of the yellow lines. Here's a close-up with the starting line marked. It doesn’t look very good up close, but it looks good from a distance. Looks pretty good in other colours, too. Iron Wind Metals 67-005 Female Sibeccai I have some miniatures on the way in the mail which I had intended to use for practicing tartan and other free hand designs. I will post one as a step by step at a later date. Geoff

This is one of the male characters in my RPG group. I added the ax weapon to the original charter.