Here's a slightly revised version with the water made to look more icy,and the red bike added.

The snow banks are sketchup.I scaled and stretched an irregular rock and placed it where I thought the snow should go.The snow on the trees was done by changing the colour of the leaves' texture in photoshop and re-applying it in Thea.

As we are coming to that time of year,a snow scene version.

Some small lights added

The edge tile on the corner was just a happy coincidence when I applied the material but it works well to indicate the thickness as timinder wrote!
Heres another view,this time from the rear,across a garden pool.

2 more from low level,with low evening sun(the best type of lighting I think)

3 new images with different lighting conditions using HDRIs.
The houses were modeled in Sketchup,the landscape assembled in Thea and everything rendered in Thea overnight using the interactive mode.

I think this belongs here...

Lighting is pretty much what I aim for,and as I said many times before, I always will err towards mood/lighting at the expense of detail.

Its hard to describe my method without referring to Thea renderer as this is the only render engine that I work with now,particularly the interactive renderer.

I am not knocking any other renderer,but when I get the chance I always spend an hour or so in my day just playing with the light on a few old models.It helps that I am my own boss and the fact that I can play with these models makes me a great boss but a bad employee!

This website is brilliant for setting up images,and I have used it so many times:
http://photoinf.com/General/Johannes_Vloothuis/landscape_composition_rules.html

Gorgeous image John,your use of texture is really unique and also so much in keeping with your models.I think your images are some of the best I have seen here,and they also carry a "signature" which is very much your own.

Very nice,beautiful colours and textures

Attached are a few stylised NPRs previously uploaded to the Thea forum.
The bridge is from 3d warehouse by Toon joosten and the surrounding landscape is a sandbox landsape from sketchup.The trees are from the Thea website which can be downloaded by licenced users and the vines on the bridge were created using the free program "Thomas Luft's Ivy Generator".
The third image is more abstract than the previous 2 but I was experimenting with colour,and in this case the absence of it, as a lot of the image is actually pure white.

Unfortuanatly it is my experience that the file size will be huge.I think that Thea is working on a proxy method for hi res 3d planting in sketchup which will help significantly but as it stands,detailed plants from companies such as xfrog etc are just too large in file size for sketchup,no matter how you go about importing them.

I think Andybot hit the nail on the head.When I first started rendering in vray,most of my vegetation was done in post i.e photoshop with a sketchup tree behind the camera and in line with the light throwing a shadow,particularly if the tree is close to the building as it takes quite a bit of work to make it look like the shadow is falling on the building if it is done in post.

But the key to adding any entourage such as planting,people or cars is to ensure that the light on the entourage matches the light on the render,otherwise it looks like you have multiple light sources, and while this can work in a more stylised image,it will be very obvious in an image that is meant to be photorealistic.

I currently use Thea but the lessons I have learned over the years in using a more limited package(I mean that in the sense that Thea can create vegetation/entourage very quickly due to its "instancing" tool)is that bad lighting will always make a good model look bad.

Basically if you have a render with high sunlight,dont use an entourage/plant image from an overcast sky and visa versa.

Heres the original render (reduced to 1600 for the forum)and a longer uncropped version of the first image.I have added a small texture to the image which helps to reduce the effect of the grain and also helps tie the entire image together.The colours are also more saturated,maybe a bit too much!

This image was rendered overnight but was too grainy so I took the drastic act of blurring the entire image and layering additional planting in photoshop to create a depth of field.(regarding the vegetation,the trees and some of the low planting are rendered,the rest is photoshopped along with the web at the bottom right.)

The original render was way too green at the foreground so I added the coloured flowers and colour toned them so they help to carry the colour of the brickwork forward into the image.Similarly,the pink/purple flowers on the extreme left immediatly behind the foreground plant mirror some of the flower colours in the middle ground of the extreme right.

3 images done using the relight function in Thea.

Most of the images I have uploaded over the last few months have been from jobs we have modeled and uploaded here, in some cases, years ago.
Myself and my brother are architectural technicians and the vast majority of of our jobs are technicaly based ,i.e. planning,tender or construction/working drawings,with 3d as a bonus.

When we are busy,I always try and find a few hours to "play"- try out different renders.As most of my recent images are based from the interactive mode from Thea,these normally render in the background,and/or overnight.

When I actually have a "lunch break"( when you work for yourself,this rarely happens) I always end up in Thea,either trying out a new render,lighting,texture or viewpoint, or checking out how some of the .3ds or .objs that I have downloaded work.

• as someone once said - Its not what looks real,its what looks right.

Regarding doing these images as a business,I have always found that the clients don't want depth of field/ foreground vegetation/mood,- they all want basic high noon,blue sky,but in my own opinion,the best images we create come from just playing around.
(this building/buildings are part of a scheme that I did for my cousin in Watford,UK,just copied and edited as components in sketchup)

The trees are birch trees available from the Thea forum for free download to licenced users.The other vegetation is a combination of 3d grass such as from Itoo software that is available to buy on line and ones I have downloaded for free over the last few years.
(http://archive3d.net is a brilliant resource for free models)

A few images from a project I have uploaded here before but previously rendered in Vray.Here,again,they are rendered in Thea with no additional photoshop plants but some colour toning done in photoshop.