Some paintings start with a photograph, or a view out a window. This one started with imagination.

Pink Cumulus Cloud began as a sketch, one of four cumulus compositions drawn from memory and feeling rather than a single sky on a single day. From the start, it was meant to be soft, dreamy, and a little otherworldly, a cloud you could almost step into, not just look at.

The painting was built on an umber wash, a warm ground that glows through the lighter layers. The sunlit tops were painted in white with just a touch of yellow ochre, warm where the light hits. The shadows are where the color really lives, ultramarine mixed with alizarin crimson, giving them a purple, almost lavender depth instead of a flat gray.

That purple is the heart of the painting. I dabbed in pink and lavender glazes, then feathered them out again and again, until the cloud felt like it was breathing. The sky around it was painted from a soft sky blue low down to a deeper ultramarine at the top, a quiet backdrop that lets the cloud take center stage.

The edges took the most patience. Working in small sections with Liquin, thin white, then pink, then Liquin again to smooth it all out, the edges were blended until they glowed. In one spot, where the blue had gone a little too far, the paint was wiped back and re-whitened, and that happy accident left an iridescent glow that stayed in the finished painting.

Look closely, and you’ll see the finishing touch. The distant clouds, pale and bluish white at first, now carry a whisper of pink, feathered along their lower edges, paler and less saturated than the main cloud. The smaller clouds were left mostly white, so your eye always returns to the big one. And in the bottom-right corner, the signature, small and sure.

Pink Cumulus Cloud is a painting about light, softness, and imagination, and about trusting a color that feels a little daring. It is also the painting that became a print line, so the soft blending and iridescent light you see in the original can live on someone else’s wall, too.