Cartoon Bust — Long-Serving Groundsman, Sunset Gradient, Liverpool

Fifty-one years, one club, one pitch. He started cutting it at sixteen and he was still walking it at sixty-seven. When he retired, the club asked what he would like and he said a decent set of shears and a quiet life. The supporters’ trust built this instead.

The brief from the trust

They wanted it outside, on the concourse, where supporters arrive, at about 2 m, and they wanted it to be cartoon enough that nobody would mistake it for a formal memorial. On the colour they were unusually specific: a sunset, because every match he ever worked finished at one.

A gradient as the whole design

Most of the pieces we make are organised by edges — blocks of colour, a pattern, a line. This one has no edges at all. The entire surface is a single continuous airbrushed gradient running from deep coral at the base, up through apricot and pale lilac, to a cool blue-grey at the crown of the head.

That means every element has to be legible without any colour change to help it. The lapels of the coat, the collar, the peak of the cap and the line of the jaw are all read purely from form and from the way the gradient bends across them. The cap is the key: it is the only hard silhouette on the piece, and where the gradient crosses its peak it produces a horizontal band of colour that looks painted and is purely an accident of geometry.

Airbrushing a two-metre surface

A gradient this large cannot be sprayed in one pass or the transitions go patchy. It was laid in nine bands with the colours mixed wet and blended with a wide soft airbrush working upwards, then sealed under a satin clear coat. Satin, not gloss: gloss on a smooth gradient produces a mirror line down the middle of the piece that fights the colour.

On the concourse

It stands beside the turnstile he used to come through at half past six in the morning, at 2 m, on a plain concrete plinth with no plaque. Supporters touch the cap, which is the highest point and the easiest thing to reach. That wear is already visible and the trust has asked us not to repair it.