The phrase "a preliminary picture" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to an initial or early representation or understanding of a situation, concept, or project.
Example: "Before we dive into the details, let me provide you with a preliminary picture of our findings."
Alternatives: "an initial overview" or "a draft representation".
While it is obviously premature to state anything for sure, the few known facts allow us to paint a preliminary picture.
As the FBI and Boston police gathered evidence Tuesday, a preliminary picture emerged: The two bombs were rudimentary "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs, left on the ground and detonated by remote control from a cellphone or other electronic device.
In sum, the above discussion helps to a preliminary picture of the heterogeneous range of form-meaning mapping relations attested in Mandarin.
However, if the errors resulting from the faulty determining of the face characteristic points are being corrected, it is worthwhile to use hidden Markov models, which were shown in the second variant of the tests with a preliminary picture selection.
The work described here aims at providing a preliminary picture of the allelic repertoire – and not purely SNPs – of all 10 human TLR coding sequences (with exception of TLR3) within a single cohort of up to 100 individuals.
We emphasize that the data presented here provide only a preliminary picture of orangutan use of acacia and eucalyptus plantation landscapes, and we would like to address several potential sources of methodological bias before assessing the conservation implications of our findings.
Dr. Unwin said that the fossil has provided a good preliminary picture of pterosaur biology.
More research is needed to perfect, correct and quantify our preliminary picture of the pathogenesis of lung disease by particles, but a useful start has been made.
The preliminary picture is more complicated than Milgram realized, but it looks like his main finding of six degrees is in the ballpark.
Several observations by various groups have led to the following preliminary picture of PAS organization: The serine/threonine kinase Atg1 interacts with different sets of Atg proteins with Atg13, Atg17, Atg29, and Atg31 - when regulating autophagy and with Atg11, Atg13, Atg20, and Snx4/Atg24 - when regulating the Cvt pathway (reviewed in refs. 13 and 14).
When Hounsou began work on the film, he had only seen a preliminary and incomplete picture of what the character would look like.
