Done in Blender. No texture painting or images. All shaders and incredibly simple shapes.
There's a little After Effects for vignette, lens dirt and colour correction (Which probably could have been done in Blender too).

Cheese World

Thank you!! IIRC the rim light is just an area light behind them, though sometimes I do throw a fresnel on the shader or literally just paint lighting on in krita depending on the scene. That plus the heavy post processing with sharpening and everything makes it stand out extra. The carpet was just a plane with a hair particle emitter that I tweaked until it kinda had the look I wanted!

No, they are in a haze volume for a bit of depth. But sky plane would be cheaper to calculate though.

used blender to model a skeleton low poly, then made a forest and some other stuff like grass and such, then pixelized it by changing the render ratio to really low and making sure the render used on linear or cubic (cant quite remember this step been a few months), then went to gimp and mucked about with hue and value until I got some fun colors and then used some blend modes to finalize some of it