Looking for advice on my tartan trials

[OC Richard]

Well you've set yourself quite a design problem, in my opinion, because of your colour choices.

Thing is, there are attractive tartans which actually have rather weak designs but overcome it by using lovely colours.

Yellow and purple are opposite on the colour wheel and are therefore in total opposition, and black and white aren't colours per se. So it's more difficult to make something smooth and clothlike and attractive.

You can help yourself by modulating the specifc tints of yellow and purple, getting away from the pure computer-graphic tints. You also might have to make your designs more complex to lessen the impact of these somewhat garish colours, and made the tartan look less graphic and diagrammatic.

So why not, I decided to have a go at it myself. I used the only purple available, and went with a muted yellow, muted white, and charcoal grey instead of black to smooth out the result. As for pattern, I'm a huge fan of traditional tartans which are often rather complex, and I strongly dislike the Allen brothers' simplistic approach ("Macfarlane hathe thre stryppis of quhte ypon ain blak field" etc etc) which sadly continues to influence tartan design.

Anyhow here's my first stab at it, about five minutes' worth, on ScotWeb's excellent tartan generator