Strange Rain
Throughout history there have been many credible accounts of strange things falling out of the sky with the rain. Fish, frogs, worms, snails and even stones have been reported and in some instances photographed. Whether there is a natural or supernatural explanation for these falling objects has been debated for a hundred years or more.
A 16th century graphic depicting fish falling from the sky with the rain.
One possible explanation is that a waterspout, or tornado over water, can pick up a large volume of water with these creatures in it, and transport them up into the clouds possibly over miles away. Then when those clouds produce rain the fish or frogs or whatever come down with it. These are not large animals keep in mind, the fish would be about the length of your finger and the frogs are even smaller. I’ve seen some hail come down in Texas that was pretty large, and neighboring towns had some the size of golf balls or even larger, so the clouds can keep small objects suspended up there for a quite a while. I don’t think waterspouts would explain the worms or stones.
A 16th century graphic depicting frogs falling over a small Scandinavian town.
I like the simple graphics representing the fish and frogs, but the overall scene I thought was too cluttered, so I needed to simplify everything down. I wanted almost an icon for rain, but with fish and frogs. You can get pretty detailed with Spreadshirts digital direct printing method, but its nowhere near the quality of a full color photo in a magazine or something like that. It is a t-shirt after all.
My first sketch of what it might look like.
I couldn’t decide whether to do fish or frogs, so I just did one of each. In order to see what was actually falling from the clouds, I had to scale it up pretty big. If the fish got big enough to see, then the clouds were really big. If I scaled down the cloud, and just reduced the number of fish at the same size, then it really didn’t feel like rain to me. Just two fish falling from a cloud didn’t seem like rain. I don’t put labels on any of these shirts, so I’m putting all my hopes on somebody being able to pretty much get the meaning of it just by looking.
The final design.
The method was pretty much the same as the others, scan the drawing, trace it in Photoshop, importht the Photoshop file into Illustrator and trace the line drawing by hand with the pen tool, then save that file as a PNG file for Spreadshirt. Even though the design has flat shapes, I didn’t go with flex printing because of the amount of detail and the width of the stroke on the lines. In order to meet the minimum width requirements I had to increase the width of the lines so fat I didn’t like them anymore. The width they are now is about as fat as I wanted to go. I didn’t add any texture or anything at this point because I didn’t think it needed. I may change my mind down the road. I also reversed the line/fill color for the clouds because I thought black clouds gave it a more ominous appearance. Falling frogs isn’t necessarily evil, but it certainly is strange and would likely make one nervous and possibly bring up images of biblical plagues. White fluffy clouds just didn’t seem right.
Also, these shirts are filed under oddities because the are not strange creatures, they are ordinary creatures discovered under extraordinary circumstances.
