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.

Christmas in the cottage in the cwm, featuring my mom's cat, Pearlie. This is my digital artwork, not a photograph except for the cat.

This is the kind of place I like to walk in the fall and winter, with little secluded hollows and pools covered with fallen leaves and the warm autumn afternoon sun.

I have a maple tree in my yard that sometimes turns these colors in the fall - red on the outer leaves, then yellow, and the inner leaves still green. Other years, though, it just turns yellow. Then it's more like the tree in my Autumn Guardian.

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.”

I created a version of this picture several years ago, but I never posted it because I wasn't quite satisfied. So I decided to take another look and polish it a bit. I ended up changing more than I had intended, but I'm pretty happy with it now. Here's the earlier version.

I love sitting outside around dusk and watching the fireflies!

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

I first had the idea for this on a family trip around Thanksgiving of 2016. I was watching the landscape go by and noticed how the smaller trees still had their leaves, and how the dead leaves were almost pink. It may not be as beautiful as spring flowers or autumn leaves or snow, but there are scenes worth looking at even in an apparently lifeless landscape. This hanging on of dead leaves through the winter is called “marcescence”, and it is especially common in young oak trees like these.

This is my digital artwork, not a photograph.

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.

This is a night version of one of my favorite scenes—Glittering Caves of Aglarond

“Immeasurable halls, filled with an everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools. Gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hand of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, fluted and twisted into dreamlike form, they spring up from many-colored floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof; wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them; a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass.”
—The Lord of the Rings, Book III, Chapter 8