I’ve been working on various winter scenes for the past few weeks, but the frost fairies and ice dragons just aren’t cooperating right now. So I thought I’d take a break and give the HW Foal a chance to play (along with mama). Setting up the render took longer than I’d anticipated (doesn’t it always?), but what took the longest, by far, was figuring out how to make it look like mare and foal were had actually run through the snow, as opposed to running on top of a solid white surface.
I tried several methods in Poser, none of which were satisfactory, so I ended up painting all the churned-up snow by hand in Photoshop. And I use the term “painted” loosely, as I have no art training and use a MacBook Pro’s trackpad rather than a tablet. In other words, I really had no idea what I was doing, and I’m sure the churned-up snow would look much better if I kept working on it for a few weeks (or months!). But… I’m gonna call this one “done” so I can get back to the frost fairies!
PS: You’d never see a foal this young frolicking in snow on my Colorado farm, but only b/c I’ve always arranged it so that mares deliver in May or June!
Rendered in January 2020 in Poser Pro 11 Firefly at 4000 × 2667 pixels.
SCENE CREDITS: TerraDome2; Flink’s Snowfall 3; Flink’s Conifer 2; Merlin’s Evergreen Firs; rocks and pasture fencing by me.
CHARACTER CREDITS: HW Horse; HW Foal; CWRW Ultra Textures (with shaders reworked by me).