Ally MacLeod

A grim day today with a power cut in the morning and then no WiFi when the power came back on so I'm grabbing a sneaky coffee in Costa while I write this one up.

Tiday it's another portrait from the Scotland squad at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.  Tiday it's the manager, Ally MacLeod, a man who had us all believing that the World Cup was coming home before everything went horribly wrong.  Just like Joe Jordan and Archie Gemmill, Ally's been done in notan style, using the tundra supergranulators.  Except that I now know the correct terminology is that he's been posterised and this is a term that I'll try to use in future.

The first step was to reserve all the white areas.  As well as the whites recommended by the Notanizer app, I put in a couple of highlights in Ally's eyes because the twinkle in there was a big part of ally's aura.  More on those highlights later.

As is normal when posterising with the tundra colours, I painted over all the light, medium and dark areas in tundra pink.  Today, though, I didn't just drop in water and drier tundra pink to create some variation, I also dropped in some watery tundra green and tundra orange.  I added the orange around Ally's cheeks nd the green on his forehead and chin, befitting the typical colour temperatures of those areas.

Then I painted tundra blue over all the medium and dark areas.  Again I dripped in bits of the brown and orange as well as more of the blue and more water.

And then the third layer was tundra violet in the darkest area and I made it interesting with more water, violet, green and orange.

The final stage was all about searching for a likeness.  I made corrections to the pink, blue and violet shapes where I'd missed res from the value plan.  I wet and lifted out some paint to suggest some teeth in Ally's smile.  And I added more pink and blue in places that the app wasn't recommending but where I could see value differences in the source photo that I thought might improve the likeness if I added them.  Finally I dropped some of the pink and blue into the highlights in Ally's eyes because the white highlights there looked too bright.  And that was me done.

I didn't think this one looked that great close up but was shocked when I looked at it from the other end of the studio.  The likeness and the personality are both there when this one's viewed from a distance.  The close up cropped view of the face is doing everything I wanted it too, looking deep into Ally and revealing, dare I say, a childish naïveté?  And his optimism is infectious.  Not only do I still believe Scotland will win the 1978 World Cup but I believe I'll win Portrait Artist Of The Year next year.  Ally's up for sale.