As the brilliant sun sets over the winter landscape, Applejack, dressed up a bit for a light walk outside, jumps on the fence and looks over the setting sun, with the trees lacking leaves looming over the land. :)
 
I wanted to make a behind shot with a pony looking at something quite bright over the horizon, with the sunlight casting some light through the skin and fur. This image itself went through several revisions trying to find something that looks great in the end. At first, I had the idea of a pony looking into the night sky or taking place in outer space, but it didn’t look good without changing everything around. Eventually, I settled into a sunrise/sunset setting and thought it would look just a bit better being in the sunset. I found a gorgeous HDR sky from Poliigon that manages to provide enough light. To provide the background forest, I created two different species of trees and removed the leaves to make the sunlight shine through.
 
~ Stats ~  
Render Time: 10 hours, 7 minutes, 59.25 secondsRender Engine: 1400 samples with Open Image Denoise and Cycles on Blender 2.81Geometry: 146,696 vertices, 145,773 triangles, and 40,000 fur strands.
 
~ Credits ~The pony base models used were created or modified by: kp-shadowsquirrel, poninnahka, juicedane, aeridiccore. Shader materials and hair particles were done by me afterwards for use in Blender’s Eevee and Cycles engines.  
All textures used in this artwork are from textures.com, Poliigon, included with each pony model, or handmade by me using procedural textures.  
Applejack is created by Lauren Faust and owned by Hasbro Inc. for use in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.