Childhood memories of opening my Christmas stocking inspired my picture. The big presents were from Mum and Dad, but the ones in the stocking were special because they were from Father Christmas. He always knew when I had fallen asleep and then it was safe to deliver them. The other thing I remember was opening them up early in the morning when my parents were sitting in their chairs still half asleep.

Image created using Poser and rendered in Lux Renderer using Reality. The flares were added using one of the filters in Filterforge.

I had the rough idea for a few weeks, but it took around three days of setting up the scene and trying different ways of lighting it. I'm still fairly new to Reality and had to try around 9 different setups to get the look I wanted. The rendering took about an hour and a half, but I just left it, so it may have been ok sooner.