The name cumulus is Latin (I believe) and it means resembling a pile or "heaped up." These are your puffy "cotton like clouds." They are low level clouds (unlike cirrus) They are made of water droplets as opposed to Cirrus and higher altitude clouds that are made of ice crystals. They generally are fair weather clouds but they can turn into cumulonimbus which can produce rain, storms and even tornadoes. NC Wyeth painted a lot of these clouds. I do believe in the painting above that the horizontal cloud the goes across the picture plane is a stratus cloud. I will explain this cloud later. Kids tend to love these clouds the best because they can turn into roosters and aliens and giants and the like... The reason NC used those horizontal stratus clouds is to A) break up the strong verticals and B) Give a sense of scale of the Giant. Two birds---one cloud--genius...
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