White Roses

A friend of mine gave me some roses to paint, aren't they beautiful?  And white roses are so elegant.  Due to that I wanted to keep the palette very limited so I 'starved my palette' as I heard James Gurney say.  I used only cad red, ivory black and yellow ochre (and white).  This very much enabled me to keep the roses unified, so that the changes in value were harmonized to a certain degree; the various colors I used for the roses didn't fight each other.  

This is a another study on Arches paper for oil.  I might be getting used to this paper, for studies.