Diane, thank you for your comment. I too feel that Phooshop was probably necessary, but considering how far I was able to take it in LR, and how easily I was able to batch apply it, I think that it was worth the effort in figuring out what I did.
First, the easy stuff..
I used the Lens correction for vignetting to create rather than reduce the vignette. Simple enough.
Then I used a split tone for the coloration. hue 50 and saturation of 60 for the highlights(I believe, I'm recalling from memory as I am now at work), and hue 230 (180 degrees or the exact opposite on the color spectrum) and saturation 60 for the shadows. I balanced at about 75 percent to the right. This part can be very subjective to the image, as the balance and saturation can change.
I believe I then bumped up the clarity all the way, to really give that high pass thick edge look. I also took down the saturation and the vibrancy to about -25
I used the chroma noise reduction to about 25, and no luma noise reduction
for sharpness I tried everything but was dismayed that I could use the old 20/50 bit. So I think i went with around a 20 or so at a radius of 3.0 with no detail or masking. I felt that this would help thicken the edges, something that I saw in the Russell images, that gave his work an almost painted feel.
And there you have it. Play with it if you like, I'll gladly post up the LRTemplate file later on when I get home, but even I kept thinking that each image needed it's own split tone tweaks.
Max