I have never been asked, perhaps fortunately, what one piece of advice I should give to anyone wishing to paint - but as of yesterday I offer this gem, born out of very recent experience. When picking up a piece of tissue on which to blow your nose, do ensure it isn't the same piece of tissue on which you wiped a brush loaded with brown madder oil paint. It doesn't have to be brown madder, could be any colour; some are perhaps more flattering than others, but it's never going to be a pleasant experience. Really it isn't. Moving on from quite a battle with soap, water, and a dash of white spirit; good deal of scrubbing; some embarrassment, I spent part of yesterday looking through an ancient how-to book - one of the old Walter T Foster publications, in this case featuring the work of the Hungarian born Béla Bodó. There were numerous step-by-step demonstrations, in which the work seemed to develop in an organic and planned way from one step to the next until a finished result was achieved. Well, yes. Hmmm. Perhaps. And yet, if my own practice is in any way typical, those steps aren't logical and planned at all, nor are they simple; things develop, yes, but not from a careful drawing all the way to a finished painting. Trees will come out, or go in; figures ditto; a whole colour scheme may change along the way - I still, after years of painting in oil, have precious little idea at the outset of how the thing will actually turn out ... How, I wonder,about you? Could you provide honest step-by-step guides to your paintings? Or would you cheat, and leave out innumerable "stages" in which you had just got it all wrong and needed to start again? I could ask Mr Bodó, who is still with us, rather extraordinarily, but I wonder if he'd tell me if he had ever so slightly simplified these stages.. And speaking of advice, I stopped to count the number of colours I had used in my latest battle with oil paint: now, it WAS a battle and at the moment still is; things went a bit wrong, and I had to modify colours in places with glazing, or just plain overpaint some pretty ghastly patches. So you'd expect the colours to have proliferated a bit; but I used Flake White; Flake White Hue; Zinc White; a little Titanium White; Cadmium Red Deep; Cadmium Red Light; Winsor Red; Indian Red; Brown Madder; Winsor Red; Rowney Golden Yellow; Yellow Ochre; Sap Green Hue; Pthalo Green - which, for once, came to the rescue -, Cadmium Yellow ... and Cobalt Blue. And Indigo. I always know I'm getting desperate when I have recourse to Indigo... And the result, unsurprisingly, is as harmonious as a kaleidiscope (or a steel band, but let us leave my prejudices out of this...). How much simpler it all seemed when Michael Willcox produced his book Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green, and promoted and sold a range of paints comprising Titanium White; Burnt Sienna; Cadmium Red Light; Quinacridone Violet (aka Permanent Rose), Yellow Ochre, Raw Sienna, Cadmium Yellow Light, Lemon Yellow, Pthalo Green, French Ultramarine, Pthalo Blue, and Cerulean. Not only could you mix virtually any colour from those, but the limited palette ensured a degree of harmony. For a time, I laid my golden yellows, Indian Yellow and Red, Cobalt Violet etc to one side, and used just those colours. But I got bored. I began to yearn for Naples Yellow, and the fact that I could have mixed it from white, Cad Yellow and perhaps just a touch of Burnt Sienna failed to console; I missed the feel of Flake White, and its fast drying-time. I ran out of space even on my largest palette for all the mixing I needed to do - yes I know you can make a perfectly good Cadmium Orange from Cad Red and Cad Yellow, but that's two colours, plus white, and a good bit of mixing space.... I began to lose the faith. Plainly, after my mammoth battle with half the colours ever invented, I need to regain it. I do wonder, though - is there anyone out there whose painting methods were so transformed by Michael Willcox that they now use only those colours he recommends? Or do you occasionally, when no one is looking, squeeze a furtive dollop of Indian Red onto the palette? Especially the professional painters amongst you - do you really find this restricted range perfectly adequate, or do you turn lasciviously to the Michael Harding and Old Holland ranges, not only for the higher pigment loading those paints possess, but also for the huge range of colours? Do you find Cadmium Red Light adequate as your scarlet/orange red, or can you not resist Golden Barok Red (slurp....) or Cremnitz White ground in Walnut Oil (hold me someone, while I faint...)..? Lurking within this flippancy is a serious question. I should be very interested in your answers. Because, in all honesty, while I would never have wanted to use all those colours in my latest, I don't think the colour harmony is really quite so bad as I've made out; and for the sake of variety if nothing else, there are times when I do get fed up with Lemon (Hansa) Yellow, and Titanium White - and the ubiquitous French Ultra.... Don't tell me what I should do, because -perpetually awkward - I won't do it! But do tell me what YOU do, and where your thinking on the use of colour has taken you.