Composition is very good. I guess you are very good at photography.
However, lightings and textures still need alot of work. Especially the ambien area. or did you turn off the globle light? seems like the gamma is too high. Pay more attension to details.
The character is interesting.
You can invest mote time in detail modelling of the buildings and lighing control, like the caustic light reflect from the lake to the castle and tree trunk.
Anyway, nice move, keep it up.
you may able to create fast and fake (but non accurate) soft area light.
You only need to render shadow as a seperate pass. go to photoshop and add gausian blur to all the shadow pass. composite back to your original. it is way faster and will have a better effects. but maybe as you said, you don't want to spend time on composition.
You can also assign a colored light to be a fake radiosity. Any picture the audience will see are just dot on a paper or pixels on the screen, it doesn't matter how you create them, it's the outcome that counts.