Creatures Of A Winter Sunset

One December evening several years ago, 2009 in fact, I was standing at the window in our family room, enjoying the scene in front of our home. The flaming orange colors from the setting sun showed up the bare trees of the snowy woods across the way beautifully. But the closer I looked, the more I realized, this was no ordinary winter scene.

We had visitors!!

Fortunately, the camera wasn’t too far away. Though I wished it had been fixed with a longer lens, the 200mm that I used seemed to do the trick. The deer were frequent guests at what we laughingly called “The Bryan Buffet” … our front-yard landscaping. Seeing the deer across the road near the woods on this particular evening, instead of nibbling on our shrubs, made a nice change of pace. Plus I’m pretty sure our poor azalea bushes enjoyed the reprieve, as well!!

Original photo taken by myself with the Nikon D300 and my trusty 18-200mm vr Nikkor lens December 23, 2009. I’ve held onto this image all these years … hoping someday that inspiration would strike and I’d find a way to edit it that I thought did the magic of that particular moment justice. I finally decided to work this image with a fully hand-painted treatment in Corel Painter 2015, using the Wacom tablet and stylus. My thanks to Flypaper Textures for the added color and mood which I think added to the impressionistic-y look.

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Forgive the nasty watermark … a version with better resolution and more viewer-friendly watermark can be seen by clicking on the image.  Watermarks will never appear on purchased products, by the way!!