Rain.

One of the books has a lot of rain in it. I was worried that it would be difficult to paint rain so I left this problem for as long as possible. Fortuitously, Stephanie started getting tips about watercolour painting from Ian's mum, and bought me a bottle of masking fluid she thought might be useful to me for rain. You paint the rain drops in liquid latex, it dries into yellow rubber, and then you can paint a wash of paint all over it, I also paint a bit of an outline around each drop and a tail above them, and when it's dry you just rub the latex raindrops off and ta-da! Rain is falling down. I experimented a bit to get this look right. If they don't have a tail they look like snow flakes. They have to be reasonably subtle though.

I tried to find some examples of rain to copy from, but in the end I had to develop my own style to suit the books. Actually, the most helpful information I could use is what I remember from watching Playschool when I was little. One of my favourite episodes, I'm sure I saw it several times on repeats. The lady drew a street in crayons, blue for the houses and cars and yellow for the raincoats, and then washed it all in grey or something, and there was an observation on how yellow looks very bright in the rain so that's why we wear yellow raincoats for safety. So I basically went with that, painted everything sort of greyish and dull, did the raindrops, and went all out with the yellow raincoat. It's as good as I could have hoped! Is this cute or what:

This is one of the better rain pages. It's not as clear when the rain is falling on a garden background, but it's still effective.