Big Ron Atkinson

Got or keep going with these posterised portraits. Twelve days to go before the PAOTY lineup is announced. Looking through my waiting list of potential subjects last night, there was nobody that I was in the mood to paint. So I searched online for people with an 18 March birthday. There aren’t many UK celebrities in that club, let me tell you. I ended up with Ron Atkinson, former manager of Man Utd, West Brom, Villa, Sheffield Wednesday and plenty of others.

It was only after finding one particular photo of Ron, though, that I decided he was to be today’s subject. The photo was taken on a very sunny day when Ron was wearing a light coloured suit. The sort of image that I could attempt to paint with minimal colour and lots of white paper showing. An exciting challenge. And it was only while out in my walk today that I decided on watercolour s my medium and the tundra supergranulatotors as my colours. All of my different media were in with a shout until then.

So we’ve gone for a posterised portrait using the supergranultors. It’s a variation of my tried and tested tundra posterised colour scheme. I went for a three value plan rather than four and used a grid to map out all the boundaries between highlights and midtones. I didn’t mark out the darks because, with such small mid tone areas to paint them on top of, I was confident that I could add them accurately enough without pencil guidelines.

Rather than masking out all the highlights, or even just the small highlights and the boundaries of the bigger ones, I only masked out highlight islands and a few hairs. I would just have to be more careful than usual with my first wash.

And, because I needed to be careful with that first wash, I started by wetting all the mid tones and darks and leaving things a couple of minutes to start to dry, then I stabbed in bits of tundra pink as a starting point. Then I randomly charged in drier applications of tundra green and orange and more of the pink, being careful to keep all three colours to similar values. And finally I went around the edges of all the midtones with drier paint to harden them.

Once that was dry, I added tundra blue as a second was over all the darks. It was a pretty easy job: there were enough landmarks within my first layer of paint for me to be able to tell where the dark shapes should start and finish. And after removing all the masking fluid, standing back and deciding no further tinkering was necessary, that was me done.

And I have to tell you I think this one’s brilliant. I’ve nailed the likeness and the bright sun. There’s lots of variation in that first layer of colour. And it’s suitably minimalist: according to ChatGPT, 84% of this one is plain white paper. Ron’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.

Meanwhile, happy 87th birthday Ron. I hope the bubbly’s flowing.