Update

A few cool things: 1)progress 2)I've developed a new method of translating my paintings into 3d space!

1) I've begun to work on my fourth shot, and have almost completed the second and third. I'm getting a lot more comfortable in Nuke, and feel confident enough to take my own work into the program and begin to work on it. Adding layers of atmosphere, glows, birds and sheep (in some instances!) will hopefully add a lot of life to each shot.

2) I have developed a method that not only has sped up my entire process drastically, but also given me a lot more flexibility while translating each painting into 3d space.

Before: I had been modeling each foreground object, keeping the edges painstakingly close to the concept art. This took time, and often would have to be altered when painted over.

After: I now model with planes. Because the painting is projected, no matter where I position the card (plane), it will line up with the rest of the painting. I can also then easily create an alpha channel that won't reveal the mirrored texture that gets projected onto the back side of the geometry, as was the problem with modeling objects with a front and back.

Taking that a step further, I can increase the tessellation of that plane and model it with the sculpt geometry tool.

This is nice because I can model the geometry beneath the painting in realtime - Maya's high quality render panel gets a pretty clean version of the painting displayed. And I now have a lot more flexibility when painting, as I can easily deviate from the painting when I need to. What's tough now is moderating the amount of iterations that I can put out as it can turn into a rabbit-hole. Nevertheless it's nice to have that ability.