Venturing into unknown territories

Snader

lately i've been wanting to push my boundaries.. and since there's no school atm, this seems like a good time to do so..
i want to improve myself in a few areas and try new things.. i've never really done anything of an environment, hardly did anything over 500 triangles, and i'm new to photosourcing textures as well.

this project should improve me on those points quite a bit. first i want to make several modular pieces that make up a nice and varied building, then add some props and stuff in there, and texture everything and maybe, very maybe see if i can get it in unreal or something.

i've chosen 2 pictures from my girlfriends holiday pics, i like the mess and that theres a lot of ''quick fixes'' in the pictures so i want to try and keep that feeling.
http://pixelsnader.nl/stuff/Practice/BILD0498.JPG
http://pixelsnader.nl/stuff/Practice/BILD0408.JPG

i just started modeling some shapes and things.. and then i got stuck.. im not sure how to make pillars and trims etc so i can build nice big blocks of building. i'd like some opinions on what i've done so far, and if this is a good approach or i should start over again..


TLDR:
making a modular scene and want some crits

stimpack

seems like a good approach if you have in your head all the pieces you need to make. I personally find what i need to make, then section off everythin into big chunks and figure out what i can repeat and what needs to be unique. Trim and such is just time intensive. Most trim on basic buildings is really simple shapes, so just model it out and bake it down to your lowpoly.

keep going, kinda hard to crit at this point. Its like looking into a big bag of legos and going "ok see what im making?" hehe. More people will chime in once u get farther along