Assignment 2 Point of Sale Display - Autumn

I guess the mythical client would like an image that is in the same style as the summer one, but there isn't any one item that represents Autumn to me so I chose to do a group of vegetables. I made some sketchbook studies;

and a preliminary drawing of some suitable vegetables!

This worked better than I expected though I would have preferred to start with coloured paper as for the strawberries I'm not sure what colour would work. The brown here is sort of meant to represent earth (freshly dug veg from the garden) because it was a preliminary drawing it was on A3 paper - not square. I printed it out and changed it to a square;

then tried tessellating it

Does this work? I'm not sure that it does and I'm still not happy with the background colour. I chose a variety of coloured vegetables to represent the variety of produce available but this makes it difficult to choose a background colour that enhances all the vegetables.

I thought that the background could represent the season;

but now my pencils are becoming wishy washy. The computer can fix this;

Which gives me a great image but its difficult to superimpose the vegetables without making them look washed out or unappetising, getting them lost in the background, or loosing the background itself (this is just a rough I've played with loads of arrangements which I didn't save at the time)

( I cut out the pictures from my preliminary drawing)

This worked a bit better maybe but the vegetables are overwhelmed by the background again.
I decided to darken my original leafy background and try regrouping my vegetables

I think this maybe has a bit more punch but still isn't right. It's become to tight and controlled, the Summer fruit was freer and had more punch. This is cobbled together. I'm going to step away from this project for a bit and have a think, do some of the exercises in the next section and come back to this afresh.
I know that I should plan my images better but I find they get static if I keep working into an idea, I need to let it evolve then come back to it in a few days to assess whether my ideas have any merit which I guess means I'm not really suited to commercial illustration with deadlines and expectations of clear ideas. However I suppose a real client would give feedback to preliminary ideas and would have ideas of their own which could be a bonus or a curse.....