I mentioned in my last blog post that I was thinking of entering the RBA open submission, a first for me. It's got to be one of the largest submissions for the Federation of British artists at the Mall Galleries. The subjects and media cover pretty well everything, from portrait/ landscape/ still life to watercolour/ oil/ pastel etc I bit the bullet and sent in a jpeg just before the online submission closed. I delivered the painting, (which luckily got through the pre-selection), last Friday, they were judging yesterday and today. I'd like to put in a plea for a few crossed fingers from fellow POL members, please..... The results will be posted by 12pm on Thursday on the Mall Galleries site, so not too long to wait. My husband and I visited Venice in October last year for a short break, and finally I've got round to painting some scenes from photos I took whilst we were there. Thankfully the sun shone for us for a couple of days, and I managed to photograph some wonderful reflections in the canals. I'm enjoying trying to produce a series of paintings with different effects on the surface of the water. Some of the reflections are almost like glass, some are a series of squiggles and some are broken impressions as the surface of the water is disturbed by either wind or a passing boat. Whilst the snow and rain continue to fall outside my window, I feel like I'm in sunny Venice - at least for a few hours each day :)