You know that moment when the sky does something so pretty it almost looks fake? That’s what got me. I caught an iridescent cloud on my phone.

Iridescent clouds are a rare atmospheric phenomenon, appearing only under very specific conditions involving thin clouds and uniformly sized water droplets or ice crystals.

I had never seen this type of cloud before, and after reviewing the images on my phone, it felt like I had captured something so rare that it inspired me to paint it.

This painting is my second attempt at the sky this month. The first one… we don’t talk about the first one. (Okay, we do: I abandoned it. The paint was nearly dry, and I just didn’t love it.) This time I started from my own photos, and something clicked — I started laying the paint down in little swirls, following the way the cloud actually curls and turns. Nobody taught me that one. My hand just started doing it.

Even though this technique worked, I still struggled with colors. My pinks came out too dark, and adding white turned them pastel. My purples leaned too red, and adding white also made them pastel.

The palette is doing all the talking: pink melting into lavender, lavender into pale blue, pale blue into white. It’s the part of the painting that makes me smile when I look at it — which, if you know me, is saying something, because I’m usually my own worst critic.

After many color mistakes and wiping away the colors multiple times, I embraced the white and used that with blue to give the cloud an iridescent feel.