Umberto Oldani provides a demonstration using illumination, materials, and rendering techniques to create a great looking still life scene in Blender and also touches on compositing the image to its final stage.
In this tutorial you can see the steps I use to get a rendering through Blender, showing a “Still Life”. I jump the modeling as the objects shown in the scene are easy. I focus the attention to texturing, lighting, rendering and compositing.
Umberto doesn’t spend too much time going over the modeling of the scene, however he does note that it is a fairly simple endeavor and provides some quick tips for managing some of the models.