Rainworks was created by Peregrine Church about 2 years ago. He came up with the idea when he saw a video about super-hydrophobic coatings, which repel water from surfaces. Peregrine realized that if you applied a super-hydrophobic coating onto a surface that changed color when it got wet, you could create invisible messages that would appear in the rain.

Peregrine and his friends began decorating the streets of Seattle with rain-activated street art in May 2014, and have been doing it ever since. Rainworks are temporary, and they last 2-4 months on average (although Church explains that they last as long as a year under the right conditions) so the team is constantly creating new rainworks as the old ones fade away. They’ve built an online map where you can find the precise locations of our Rainworks. They encourage people to go on rainy-day scavenger hunts to find the rainworks in their neighborhoods!

In March 2015, this video about Rainworks went viral online. Between uploads on YouTube and Facebook, the videos has netted over 17 million views. In response to the video’s popularity and messages from enthusiastic people who wanted to create their own Rainworks art, Church launched a Kickstarter campaign to release his hydrophobic coating: Rainworks Invisible Spray.

With support from over 600 backers, they successfully reached a crowd-funding goal of $50,000 and now we are working hard to get Invisible Spray into the hands of creators around the world.

According to Church, the team’s missions “is to give people everywhere a reason to look forward to rainy days!”