"Coffee, Eggs, and Grapes" Oil on 6x6 inch panel

 I don't know what my trouble has been, but lately any time I try and paint, I wind up with something I'm not happy with.  I have a hard time controlling the paint, I eventually get frustrated and can't finish.   I set up this little still life and 1/2 way into painting it, I stopped and scraped it off, and decided to draw and sketch instead of trying for a finished painting.
Above is one of my quick sketches with pastel pencil on gray paper, and below is an 8x10 inch canvas panel, that I divided into 4 spaces.  In each space I tried something different.  In one square I drew the still life with pencil on the gessoed surface, and sprayed workable fixative over it. After it dried, I painted it in.  It was fun to do, but nothing that I thought made a big enough difference to me. And the paint is taking longer to dry in that square.   A couple other squares I toned with some thinned raw umber, once dry I wiped some linseed oil onto the panel before I painted.  That worked out ok, but I not a big difference there either.  Some where along the way I mixed some turpentine, linseed oil and stand oil together, and used that to thin my paint a bit while I painted and that helped!   And along the way I was also playing with the idea of only using black, burnt sienna, cad. yellow and white.   So,  I made little squares of mixtures I made with only those colors.  It was fun to see all the different shades I could mix, and how different a color looked depending on the white or toned background. The little rows of 3 on each side of the divided line mirror each other, they are the same colors.

 Finally after all of that playing around, I repainted my picture and was happy with how it worked out.   In the final painting, I used more colors than the limited palette.