Landscape Painting 2: Inspiration, Materials, Sketch

What should the painting look like? I want to paint some of the landscapes I saw in 2020. Perhaps like this. These are tourist site photos of some the cliffside towns in southern France.:

For want of time I never painted anything precisely like this while I was there. But watercolor was never entirely satisfactory, too pale and pastel and yet unforgiving. You can endlessly repaint over oil. But it’s expensive, and it takes forever to dry. A friend advised me to try artist acrylics. I know those mainly from painting protest signs, for which primary colors are ideal. But there are other types, intended for real painting, so I’m going to take a box of Golden Color Mixing Classic acrylics out for a drive.  But it is unwise and wasteful, to just start slapping expensive paint onto a canvas. A few pencil sketches are in order, to get my ideas down. Like this:

I sure don’t do a lot of advance prep, do I? But I paint as I write, on a wing and a prayer. Knitting calls for far more preparation and thought. With a big canvas and a palette knife, however, I can just jump in!