How an Artist Puts Clouds and Rainbows in Unlikely Places

Artist Berndnaut Smilde creates clouds to photograph in odd places—here, in China’s Shanghai Himalayas Museum—using smoke and mist machines. (He retouches the images so the tools aren’t seen.)

"Himalayas," Nimbus series. 2015.
Photograph by Nina Chen

Berndnaut Smilde makes clouds and rainbows from scratch.

The Dutch artist loved tinkering when he was a child, building and breaking apart endless Lego cities in efforts to make real-life objects match the mirages in his mind. In art school, he painted for a few years before he found himself drawn back into the tactile world of sculpture. One day, he wondered if he could sculpt a cloud.

To create clouds on demand, Smilde did some homework and started experimenting in his studio. First, he wetted down the floor of his studio and sprayed a fine mist of water into the air to saturate it with vapor. He then bought in a smoke machine, like the ones used to make fog at

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