sketchbook drawing and photobashing

One of the difficulties I have in environment painting is in getting the foundation set up, I don't really like drawing digitally and I find it hard to really get a good foundation for a painting purely by painting, I feel like I need to set up a line art first. I decided to do a drawing of a simple environment in my sketchbook in the same kind of scenario as before, a buried church spire but this time with some context, I added a doorway into some lair with animal skeletons and sticks around the outside as a warning, this give some kind of an environmental in-game context.

I don't feel as though the painting stage was successful at all, I just find it too difficult to get a good value range, I started with black and white to keep it simple and even then I had trouble, I'm going to just leave it like this for now and do a bit more practice before coming back to it.

After that I also did some experimentation with a new method again, similar to one I did before this time I used a photo-bashing method:

 I took numerous photographs and sampled them over the painting and modified them enough that the composition was changed from the original photographs, I then painted over the majority of the canvas while colour picking in order to hide most of the detail, while letting some get through for texture.

I then added in the church buildings into the landscape, choosing samples that I thought would fit into the colours of this painting so far. 

As the lighting scenarios were different for each of the church buildings that I sampled I then painted over them to make the lighting match and ground them into the environment further. then I added details to finalise the composition. 

I added the sprout as a compositional device, also to add colour and to allude to the concept of the idea that while humanity has gone the world is not yet dead and life will continue to flourish, which is a core theme of my idea.

I'm not sure how I feel about the photo-bashing method, so far the outcome has been much more passable than any of my other attempts so far but I can't shake the feeling that it's really just cheating and may be a very limited tool, but perhaps this is just what I need considering my weakness for colour and value for now, perhaps if I don't rely on it too much as a crutch it may not be so bad, and my best option so far. After all it's concept art not a fine art piece.

Samples