Creating a still life painting

Sometimes, when I paint a picture, I just dive in. That's something I usually do for landscapes or portraits. However, other times, I do some preparatory work. Here is a sample of preparatory work that I did for a still life painting.

Here is the finished painting, in acrylics.

The first preparatory piece was this charcoal drawing of the jug, in which I was keen to get the curves and ellipses.

Then I wanted to move on from just a tonal drawing to one with colour, so I created a second version using coloured pastels and a splash of white paint for the table cloth.

Next, I progressed to using acrylic paints and adding in the sheep's bone.

And the final preparatory piece was a painting of a section of the still life items. I wanted to pick an area where the various items meet each other, so I could explore changes in shape, tone and colour.