Salen Bay Wrecks

I've been an enthusiast of Richard Bolton's weathered textures in watercolours style since I came across his work in 1984.  They were the early days of my attempts to be a watercolorist.  I persevered, I really did.  I even took lessons from a brilliant watercolour artist and friend, Edwin Straker of Newcastle upon Tyne.  Then I ran out of time, my career took over my life and I haven't picked up a watercolour brush for many years.  

Last week taking Grandson to Balamory/Tobermory on Mull I came across the Salen Bay wrecked/abandoned trawlers, some say the most photographed boats in Scotland.  They are beautifully weathered and crying out for sympathetic treatment.  How things have moved on, I don't have to dig out the Windsor & Newton blocks and tubes, stretch the Bockingford and clean the sables, no; I just open Lightroom and then Photoshop.  

This is the result of a couple of hours fiddle and tweak.  Not perfect but close to what I was trying to achieve.  Look at the grain on the timbers and the detail on the peeling paint.  Gorgeous.  For the benefit of Blippurists this is a photograph of a print of todays computer creation.  Maybe I could just upload the original file?  It represents what I've been doing today.  Never sure about that one or where we are now?

I've trawled (no pun intended) the internet for information about these boats.  They have been well photographed but very little has been written about them.  After 16 years writing travel guides it's second nature to me to add interesting information to accompany pretty pictures.  Struggling with this one.  I've read that they were victims of changes in EU regulations and abandoned but no detail.  I believe they may have been called Elsie May and Girl Claire but my curiosity is unfulfilled.  I'd like to know a lot more about these intriguing vessels starting with the basics.  What type of boats are they?  Who owned them?  Who built them?  Some pictures don't speak a thousand words.  Maybe if I get something on the internet that tells a story all the snappers and photographers will stop slavishly rewriting the same empty words and meaningless phrases and put some meat on the bones.   (It's a journo/publisher thing.)


I've put a couple of extra pics here…


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