this was so far my biggest project with zbrush. was a lot of fun and work. i like to share some of the techniques i used, as i have not seen them mentioned here very often . (the image below illustrates some of the points)
the eremite himself is this time modeled in parts, since i wanted to model the details and in this way each of the parts can have lots of polys. the drawback for me is, it is more difficult to get proportions correct. (but his legs are intentionally short ) the basket is made in 30 seconds with cameyo´s zplace from a torus, 
then i build up in a small sized document the big parts of the scene (all markered), the eremite, the treetrunks and i used a different layer where i put a lot of spheres indicating where i want to have later the masses of the leaves. these spheres are erased later.
now at this stage i made the lightning. i used a main sun with shadows shining from left top, and 6 colored point lights. since i intended to have lots of leaves in the image i needed to care about rendertime. since point lights render slow (at least on my comp) i decided to build a difuse map and a spec map to simulate the lightning i had from the point lights. i did this as in the manual described : i turned off the sun light, leaving on only the lights which should go in the diffuse map. i made a new layer where i placed a huge shpere colored white, with basic material. this material got diffuse=100 and all other settings=0. i turned off all the other layers and rendered the shpere (best render, no shadows). then i used the grabber tool and grabbed the image. this is the diffuse map. for the specularity map, i now changed the basic material to specularity=100 and all other settings=0. render, grab, gives specularity map. now its time to turn on the sunlight again, turn off all the point lights, put the diffuse map into diffuse channel and spec map into spec channel. use sliders to set gdi and gsi to convinient setting, to get back the original lightning. now this is a light setup, which looks like many pointlights, but renders fast.
well, the rest is mainly standard, increase document size, use the markers to place the objects again. i build some leave types and sprayed them in new layers onto the spheres (picker set to other layer) only the feathered leaves are put in with rectangle stroke, since my comp did not want to spray an object with 90000 polys… well this kept me busy some time 
oh yes, the gras is maybe interesting. i duplicated the hill layer, which was colored in shades of green and yellow with a noisy material. i turned of all layers exept the duplicate hill layer. rendered that (without shadows and depth cue) and baked. now i go to the other hill layer recolored it in shades of brown. then with the fur brush, flat material and picker to other layer and continuous color i drew the gras. (density low, length varying,gravity=-90) in this way i got the ground shine through.
oh i think thats enough theory ,enjoy !
