American tartans

[OC Richard]

Why must all American tartans have red/white/blue in them? I'd like to think we have more imagination than that...

That puts the finger on a thing that I don't care for, the shift from the original Highland approach to tartan design of tartan being a purely artistic expression, with colours and patterns selected for visual effect alone, to the 'tick the boxes' approach nowadays, where the colours are limited to the ones appearing in some other thing like a flag or county crest or soft drink bottle.

Though it is indeed quite challenging, from an art standpoint, to design an acceptably clothlike/tartanlike pattern when using such limited and untartanlike colours. I went around and around trying to design a Cornish tartan that wasn't garish, hard to do if you limit yourself to black, white, and yellow.

That Bicentennial tartan from the 1970s is pretty garish. It's a strong design but it's going to be garish if you limit yourself to red, white, and blue in equal amounts (well they did put in a little black)



This one is the most pleasing by far IMHO. We should keep in mind that tartan is cloth, for clothing, and not a diagram or logo. It strikes me as Spirit Of Scotland with underplayed red/white/blue elements added, as pleasing a design as possible if the requirement is to use pure red, white, and blue



The most successful tartan I've seen that's entirely red/white/blue is not an American one, but Scotland 2000



I was working on a tartan for a local Fire Department Pipe Band. Taking a cue from Isle Of Skye, which has three different greens, I used three different blues, to get a more tartanlike/clothlike appearance. This could pass as a red/white/blue tartan if I changed the sky blue lines to white



Now that garish Bicentennial tartan is much improved by changing all the colours in it, as here in the Dalgleish Reproduction Colours version



Three cheers for the claret, white, and grey!