Well its wayyy past my bedtime, but I figured I'd post this first...
I had more plans for this image, but figured I'd stop before I killed the magic. The sky was supposed to be even more "evil", but I settled with this, as I wasn't able to get it to blend correctly.
For the clouds, I used 2 different layers and tweaked them until they were dialed in. I had originally placed a light sphere projecting red light in the clouds, which gave an eerie evil backlit look, but the final render flattened it out for some reason, so I ditched it. I thinkthe current sky still works and conveys the mood well. For the lightning bolt, I used an alpha plane with a lightning image I painted in Photoshop, with the luminosity effect cranked up some to help light up the scene. It also didn't render properly in the final render (it was too faint), so I had to tweak it somewhat in Photoshop to bring the colors back out.
The foliage is an older grass preset that I downloaded off
3dplants.com, but with some serious aftermarket work. I think the tree is from JCINBAMA here on the TG2 forums, but I can't be 100% certain, as the tree has been seriously tweaked from its original form and I changed the name. Either way, many thanks to whoever posted it.
Specs:
res: 800 x 600
quality: 0.8
rendertime: 39 hours over 2 cores
Other than bringing the bolt back to life, only minor color/contrast/saturation/sharpening work done in Photoshop.
Many thanks for viewing.