Gull Escort

Our boat trip on the Bosphorus was escorted by a number of gulls, most of whom flew for ages within a few metres of the boat. Of course, gulls being gulls, this wasn’t exactly an altruistic gesture in their part – several of the passengers on our boat kept throwing pieces of bread to the birds, most of which were caught by beak in mid-air!

I had never really seen gulls on the wing so close and in so much detail before – which makes it slightly galling that I seem here to have painted a duck rather than a gull! I realise that my use of pallet knives as painting tools is rather incompatible with a desire to accurately paint the correct species of bird – in fact I am perhaps lucky that the object in the sky even looks like a bird at all …