How to Make The Most of Rainy Days

You’re walking down Market Street, wired headphones humming and shoulders hunched under your heavy book-bag. Menacingly, cunningly, small raindrops begin to patter on the pavement. Faces turn up and stare tiredly into the low, black sky. As the spitting turns into a heavy stream, umbrellas unfold in a sea of yellow, black, red and rainbow. Hoods are lifted, faces shadowed; wellies squeak and raincoats rustle. Footsteps on Market Street gather speed, skirting round deepening puddles and valiantly leaping treacherous mud. Our entire landscape, beyond the sky, is so often alchemised by rain. This visual metamorphosis cannot be ignored. As an artistic medium, rain offers infinite opportunities. So, for all those creative souls hoping to draw inspiration from our infamously tempestuous climate, here is a list of ways to wield the rain: 

1. Photography. Not necessarily of the sky, or even of the occasional leprechaun-spawning rainbow — think more of the rain’s properties and products. Raindrops are tiny spherical mirrors, reflecting, refracting, and dispersing light. One popular option is puddle photography. If you position your camera parallel to the puddle’s surface, you’ll capture the reflection of the landscape above and around it. It has the effect of a miniature lake — one sky sharp, the other slightly blurred and warped. Look closely, too, at the way rain lands on different surfaces. It can create patterns, sliding off roofs and through gutters, and can draw little rivers in windows.

2. Watercolour blotch-painting. If you have tubed watercolour paints, take a few colours and spread them on the paper. Make sure it’s thick watercolour paper, otherwise it’ll just curl, warp, and split apart. You may apply the paint in dots, streaks, lines, or whatever fits your whimsy. Keep in mind, though, that if you add too many colours the painting may turn out muddy — much like the puddles! Then, set it out in the rain for a few moments, and watch the colours bleed and bloom. You can even tilt the paper to nudge the paint a certain way. When you feel it’s right, remove the paper from the rain and set it to dry. 

3. Now, if you want to go further with the former, try to find pictures in the rain’s painting, the way you’d look for shapes in the clouds. Watercolour is a great medium to layer with ink, as it dries so quickly. Take a pen of any kind and outline the images you see. Add details, shade, adorn, embellish, do as much or as little as you desire. 

4. Ink blotch-painting. Ink, like watercolour, blooms delightfully when exposed to water. Make a loose sketch in ink — a portrait, still-life, landscape, what have you — and ensure you have both a paintbrush and a paper towel handy. When water comes in contact with ink, it dilutes it and allows it to run across the page. Depending on how long you expose your sketch, it will blur, blotch, and blend with varying extremities. Say, for example, you sketch a portrait. After letting the rain soak the face, use your paintbrush to drag the droplets under the eyelids and along the ridge of the nose to make shadows. You may also use a paper towel to blot certain areas, creating highlights. 

5. Footprints. On very rainy days, you’ll notice some shops have large overhanging canopies. As students walk in to buy overpriced lattes, their footprints track water into the dry, lighter flooring underneath. This creates a chaos of overlapping stamps, marked by wellies, sneakers, heels and dog-paws of all sizes. Granted, this art is temporary — unless you snap a photo to sketch up later. 

6. Percussion. This last one’s more for enjoyment. One of my favourite qualities of rain is the sound it makes when it lands on different surfaces. Its frequency and volume fluctuate, singing rhythmically as it hits umbrellas, windows, metal trash-cans and roofs. 

So I have to say, though I’m awfully tired of the rain, I cannot deny the beauty of its metamorphoses. I hope this list will lend you a few ideas on how to wield it — and that you don’t forget your umbrella on the way to class tomorrow. 

Illustration by Maya Mason