What have I learned from painting:Still Life spaces

I haven't used the full tonal range from the three colours so far so need to re-visit after a bit more tone mixing. The background is important to me but being precious about the it does not always help the composition. Having pared down the shape of the picture, the composition is tighter. Options are: to square the picture or re-define the structure of the painting (if it were a complete painting) to anchor and develop the shapes/forms into the whole A2 space. In this case I will square the image to focus on the still life. Have learned that I enjoyed the drawing process (in this case) better than the painting because it made me consider at length. Also have learned that I need to be bolder with bigger confident brush strokes in places rather than tiddly often redundant ones.