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Great advice above. Seriously, you can't pay for this stuff.

You need anatomy practice. You can use Daz 3D as a free reference:

Your sculpting looks unfinished so you need more definition. Try the pinch brush both positive and negative.

After so many back-and-forths and last minute changes, the project is finally out! Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and help! 

Hello ! I'm close to the end, I will not take too long to wrap up this project. Still a few things to do though. Any ideas and feedback regarding composition, lighting or render quality are welcome. I think mountain in background feels a little messy. And I also have the feeling that there are not enough distinction between the tavern and the background but can't really figure it out.

It is similar to scultping or painting. First get in the biggest shapes. Focus on the composition. And, if it were a game, the gameplay.

Then you can refine that a bit by replacing the chunky block out models with higher resolution ones. But maybe not the final high detail models yet.

Then you can do a similar thing for your colors and lighting. Just block it in roughly.

Now you'll have a rough draft of your entire scene. Each element of it - the models, the textures, the lighting - is somewhere between 50%-70% finished. At this stage you can still make any big changes before putting in the long hours to finalize everything. Because the models and materials are simplified, it won't be too difficult to make big changes. This is the funnest part that is all creativity and pretty much don't have to think about anything technical, so dive in and have fun.

Once you are okay with the big things, then you can go through piece by piece and detail. You can do that in whatever order you like. Bounce around, or one thing at a time. Doesn't really matter.

Thiago Klafke (maybe I mispelled, just going on memory) has a good tutorial for this whole process. I am sure you can probably find some tutorials for free as well. And if you search through other environment artist threads here you will see some variation of this process. Some people might change up the steps slightly but for the most part I think you'll see that people do a rough block in both for shapes, colors, and lighting before they move into detailed modeling and texturing, and then finalize the lighting and post process.

The big principle to keep in mind is that you try to answer the most important parts about the artwork in a way that allows you maximum flexibility to make changes, and only once you are satisfied do you go into the time-consuming detailing.

It may help to get your favorite spreadsheet app out too and breakdown the entire project into task. You might list every model needed, every texture, and estimate time needed for things like lighting and figuring out shaders or trim sheets or whatever. Then you can organize all those task into the big phases.

and so on.

Having the checklist means that you don't have to try and load so much shit into your brain. You take care of that once, write it down, and then when it is time to work you can just focus on the task at hand with confidence. Ship is already on course, now you just have to do the work.

You can also log your time working and add that to the spreadsheet, and then after the project is done you can review it. Maybe you see that you spent like 50% more time in one task than another, but the effect of that task wasn't very important, and so for the next project you'll have a better idea how to prioritize things.

I'm going to give the hard surface environment a shot.  I'll be deviating from the concept a bit, but I'll keep the general feel.  Once I get further along, I'll probably change the textures on these assets to be less NYC specific, but these were the easiest to find good reference for.  I plan on creating a full interior in UE5.  I'm most nervous about getting the blockout proportions correct so I've been putting that off.