For your other landscape paintings are you normally doing it from just visualizing a place you have seen or an actual picture ? I always found I couldn’t visualize what I wanted to paint/draw well enough to work off of, but this is awesome especially since you just made it up !
For the other paintings, I've used a photo that I took with my phone. It's not my goal to create something photographic, so I use the photos mostly for proportion and light. I think I might prefer painting without a photo reference, however. Or at least, the less I can rely on it, the better. I'm trying to paint a scene and a feeling, rather than an image of a place. In some ways the photo can become something that I have to work against. I made up the next one that I'll post, too.