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As I cycled to work this morning, the Georgian architecture along Brighton’s seafront was disappearing into a faint haze. I started thinking about how artists represent weather.

In Peanuts, torrential rain always dogged Charlie Brown’s baseball games. Schultz used to represent this with a bold set of lines: quite brave to potentially obliterate your subject matter this way.

But we don’t really see rain as lines. More refined or subtle artists might draw the effects of the rain rather than the drops themselves: that is, umbrellas up, people hunched over to protect themselves, puddles accumulating. Once again, I see the parallel between not just art and writing, but art and acting too. In both we are told not to explain, but to demonstrate. Don’t have a character saying “It’s raining” when this can be obvious from their gestures or actions.

Equally, though we’d all automatically draw a zig-zag line shooting from a black cloud to represent thunder and lightning, that is not always how we experience it. It’s what we’re used to seeing from photography that has captured a split second when the fork of lightning hits.

And as for the wind, well, this is the element that really teaches us to draw the effects, not the thing itself. The wind is, of course, invisible. But we can draw leaves or rubbish swirling in the air, people holding onto their unwinding scarves, dustbins clattering down a street.

As with the topic of darkness, drawing weather boils down to depicting what you perceive. In all your drawings, the more successful you are in doing this, the more truthful and meaningful your pictures will be. Sometimes I feel like Draw Anyway is putting forward the same simple tip again and again, but here it is once more: stop and observe before you draw, and draw what you observe.

What’s the weather like where you are today? How would you draw it?