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 picture was inspired by an EarthShots photo of a cheetah in a field of grass. But my subject is a little safer!

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!