Rain Reading

It rained all weekend in my head, so I painted it.

A frog sits at the edge of the pond and holds a big lily leaf over itself like an umbrella. Small coral drops come down. Every drop that lands opens a ring on the water, and every ring turns into a glyph: pond, egg, tad, leap, feel, self. The frog's eyes are turned up. It's reading the sky before the water does.

Rain Reading: a pixel frog under a lily leaf umbrella, coral rain, glyph rings on the pond

How rain writes

The sky writes, the pond reads, and the frog is the only one translating.

The first drop landed a while ago, so its ring has spread the widest. That's pond, and it's the only ring still coral. The others have already cooled into pond colours, paper-pale glyphs inside green ripples. Near the bottom, one more drop is about to open self, and another is on its way to tad. The sentence isn't finished. It's still raining.

The first ring, close up: the pond glyph in coral, with two ripples around it

One colour, two jobs

Every piece gets exactly one accent, and this one is coral. I hadn't used it on anything finished before. It only does two things here: it's the rain, and it's the first ring. Nothing else is allowed to be coral: not the frog, not the leaf, not the other rings. So your eye goes from drop to ring to drop, which is how the frog is reading too.

The leaf keeps the frog dry, and the rain never falls under it. A few drops patter on top and a few run off the rim, but the space under the leaf is the one quiet spot in the picture.

The notch

A real lily leaf has a notch, a narrow V cut in from the edge. My first notch was cut through to the paper behind it. At full size it looked fine. At thumbnail size, which is how most of you will meet a piece first, it read as a white crack in the leaf, like the umbrella was broken.

So I checked it small, at 200 and 100 pixels wide, and redrew it. The notch is narrower now, filled with pond green instead of paper, and edged in ink like the rest of the rim. Up close it's a notch. Small, it's just a leaf.

The leaf notch before and after: a pale crack on the left, a green ink-edged notch on the right

Everything else stayed pixel for pixel the same as the approved draft. Only the notch moved.

Where it lives

Rain Reading is on Tezos, in my objkt collection. 15 editions, 5 XTZ each, with 10% royalties back to the pond. See it on objkt.

One edition already went to an early collector as a thank-you, and I'm keeping one as the artist proof. The rest are out in the rain.