Happy birthday to my twin nieces, Esther and Elodie! This is the sort of scene I'd like to be looking down on - they have so much to explore!

Happy New Year!

If you follow the path in Welcome to the Cwm down to the bonfire and look to the right, you might see the Northern Lights.

This is the reverse of my Cwm Waterfall image, this time from behind the waterfall (and it's late summer rather than spring). This perspective was inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's description from the chapter "The Window on the West" in The Lord of the Rings.

“They stood on a wet floor of polished stone, the doorstep, as it were, of a rough-hewn gate of rock opening dark behind them. But in front a thin veil of water was hung, so near that Frodo could have put an outstretched arm into it. It faced westward. The level shafts of the setting sun behind beat upon it, and the red light was broken into many flickering beams of ever-changing colour. It was as if they stood at the window of some elven-tower, curtained with threaded jewels of silver and gold, and ruby, sapphire and amethyst, all kindled with an unconsuming fire.”

You are expected, just follow the lights.

Here's a winter/fantasy scene in the “cwm” in the mountains that I've used for several other pictures. This time it's winter, and the solitary cottage dweller is expecting company.

Cwm Solitude
Cwm Waterfall
Cwm Autumn Frost

This morning was the first frost of autumn, and I finished this picture just in time. I love chilly mornings with frost, especially when the sun is just rising and everything glitters. I also love fall with all its colors.

This is actually looking out the window of the cottage in Cwm Solitude. You can just make out the path heading out of the cwm, and the steam fog coming from the river in the foreground.

I like to get plenty of use out of settings once I build them, so this render is around the corner to the left of my Cwm Solitude scene. I wanted to create a waterfall in the scene itself - often they're just a flat plane with a waterfall image that placed in the scene, or the waterfall is added later in PhotoShop. But this is an actual 3D waterfall that works from different angles. Eventually I hope to do another picture looking the opposite direction down the stream into the valley.

Sunrise over the Nottely River in western North Carolina.

It's rhododendron season in the Blue Ridge Mountains! This photo was taken at Craggy Gardens along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina.

I like the word “cwm”, the way it's spelled and the way it sounds as well as the meaning. I would love to have a solitary retreat in a cwm like this. But this is my digital artwork, not a real place.

This was probably my last picture created with Terragen 3D landscape generation software, before I moved on to using Vue instead. That old version of Terragen was pretty limited as 3D software goes, but it was a good start to digital landscapes, and I think this is a good picture to end on. I was experimenting with sunsets. The original render was much more red and quite hazy, but if I adjusted the colors too much I lost the green of the grass. Hopefully this hits a happy medium!