Environment challenge!

I will be entering the art for games website's environment challenge. Ill try and make one of my favorite areas of a game. FFIX Cid's Castle. I will post here as i work on it as well as on the competitions forum. I hope to finished in about 2 weeks since the deadline is on Aug 8th. if anything i would like to be done with all assets in 2 weeks and just tweak values and settings on shaders until the deadline.

heres some ideas for the theme and then the second pic for a style.

***UPDATE***

I found the view I will be making. lets get this shit started!