Can anyone tell me of any decent tutorials on painting detailed patterns?

This will help
Good luck
Keith
http://www.planetfigure.com/threads/how-i-paint-patterns.52638/

Cheers

Now just need a link to get the talent

I have been looking for that link for ages with no success, sorry Mate.
Keith

If I find it, I'll let you know mate......

I certainly don't have anything like Zernina's talent! When I was trying to paint my Rainy Mountain Charlie and Charlie's woman as a two bust combo, I stalled for ages over the blanket patterns. I wanted to follow some Navajo designs I had found on the internet. Being terrible at freehand designs I planned them out using different thicknesses of masking tape (obviously this works best if your pattern is geometric in nature). I then blocked in the ground color around the tape and, being a total masochist, I fine tuned the detailed part of the design by laying on many many tiny strips of masking tape to create the final design and then removed them one strip at a time as I painted in the final colors. This method means you need very little talent, to keep everything clean and symetrical - just an appetite for highly repetitive detail work and an optivisor! You could actually airbrush the base coat over the initial mapping out for a smoother finish but I didn't have access to my airbrush when I was doing this as I was travelling. In order to figure out roughly how the design would work in relation to being folded over as part of a blanket, I got a piece of tissue paper cut to roughly the same size as the blanket on the figure, sketched the pattern onto it and then folded it in the same way as the resin piece on the figure, this gave me a good indication of how to map it out. I actually toyed with the idea of doing the design in pencil on the tissue paper and then cutting it into sections to match the areas on the figure, wetting them and laying them onto the figure with the pencil work face down, I figured that way I should be able to let it dry and then rub over the back of the tissue paper with a pencil in order to effect a tracing of the pattern onto the figure like we used to do when tracing things in primary school. In the end I found that just looking at the pattern gave me enough to figure out how to replicate the pattern so can't confirm if the tracing idea really works. Here's some progress pics which show what I mean.

My problem is not having a steady hand.
Did manage to get to here before skill ran out

Jolly decent of you young man, I await your call

Mate I would be over the moon if I had painted that.
Well done You, first class.
Keith