Thank you masque for your explanation. I used Lightroom (v4 in my case) too to work on mine. But although i achieved a great balance with the textures (to my eyes), they still lack that illustrative quality that you got.
Some people call it HDR mostly i think because of the extra detail that it brings to focus, but what i´m looking besides the detail is that drawing/illustrative quality that you mastered very well in your first image.
You successfully faded the photographic nature of the image and added a hand drawn flair to it. I think the deep blacks and the soft vignette is were i've missed the spot (among other stuff probably)

I´m still searching for mine and would post here if you don´t mind just to make more clear what i´m talking about.
Thanks for sharing.