I Found a Rare Iridescent Cloud on a Mountain Trail , so I Painted it!

On a crisp morning, a few friends and I hiked into the mountains expecting snow and a good view from the summit. What we didn’t expect was something strange and beautiful happening in the sky. Along the trail, I noticed something shimmering through the trees — a cloud glowing with soft bands of color. I called the others back to take a look. It turned out to be cloud iridescence, a rare atmospheric phenomenon where sunlight creates rainbow-like colors in thin clouds. Everyone stopped and stared, ooing and awing. We all felt an amazing sense of wonder. This feeling is something we all need to experience, and is what I seek to cultivate more of in my own life through art.

What is Cloud Iridescence?

Cloud iridescence (sometimes called irisation) happens when sunlight interacts with extremely tiny droplets of water or ice crystals inside certain types of thin clouds. For this phenomenon to occur, the conditions have to be just right. The clouds are usually high in the atmosphere, such as altocumulus, lenticularis, cirrus and cirrocumulus. These clouds must also be very thin and located close to the sun in the sky. Most importantly, the droplets inside the cloud must be incredibly small. The cross section of a single human hair is 10 microns, and these water droplets are on average only 1 micron!

I was so inspired, I went home and did a painting of the cloud to see if I could capture the colorful effect. Working in acrylic gouache, I used a stippling technique to build thin glazes of layers of color variance and create the cloud's texture.

Check out the Youtube video showing a glimpse behind the scenes of this process and see the final painting:

Thanks for reading!

Katy