Here the winter was very long this year. Not as cold as the east but it was not very pleasant. Thankfully it has begun to warm up and the snow and ice are melting.Since the last post I have been very busy. I have been doing preparatory work for new paintings and a portrait commission. Before I start these new paintings I needed to do a colour study. The source material for these are black and white and so my task is to work out a simplified colour palette for translating that material into coloured work. I chose a simple colour pose that I had in my reference folders to work from. The exercise was successful as far as my task went but I continued beyond what was needed for study and it became a finished painting in its own right. It is oil on canvas and the size is 16x15" Except for a touch of Verditer Blue in the back ground the five colours I used were raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, Van Dyke brown and white. This is very simple compared to my usual palette where I use many more tubed colours. More about the palette when I post images of new work soon.