The Out Side:
The overall image was created with Blender and is just a sculpted plane with a few trees created using the Sapling add-on. Only two trees were created then duplicated, scaled and rotated. The ground material is a simple green with a tanish cloud texture added and a very slight bump map using the noise procedural texture. The water is just a blue plane.
I then loaded the render into GIMP and started painting! Using four layers I panted white, black, dark blue and light blue on the water with the paint brush then used the smudge tool to get some nifty painted water flowing. After that I selected everything but the water and applied oil painting, selective Gaussian and cartoon filters. Before the filters I used the levels tool to adjust the contrast a bit.
You can find 1920x1080 and 1024x768 versions in the downloads/wallpapers section of my website linked in my signature.
If you didn’t already figure, I used Blender Internal for the render. Feel free to tell me what you like and don’t like.
Edit: Forgot to mention that I used a shadeless black plane behind the trees to make it appear as if the foliage was thick enough to block out the light. I can’t put too many trees in there because rendering them crashes Blender on my system, lack of RAM I suppose. One of these days I’ll get around to playing with dupliframes which I hear can save on RAM usage.
