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
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.
Although we tend to think of it more in the summer, the ocean is there all year.
This was inspired by the Disney short film “Piper”.