Mastering Landscape Drawing: Trips from the City to the Sea

Through engaging exercises, readers will learn how to tell a story while painting and drawing a landscape, a cityscape or seascape with watercolour and other techniques.

This hands-on guide to landscape watercolor and other drawing and painting techniques takes readers on a series of excursions from the sea to the city, mastering the use of line and color along the way. A useful manual for drawing on the spot, it offers valuable insight into how to carefully observe the landscape before us and choose what about it we want to express; how to select and prioritize visual information; and how to apply drawing techniques to create the illusion that our compositions have been arranged effortlessly, as if by nature itself. In each
of the book’s five sections (Color and Materials; Horizontality and Depth; Graphics, Shadows and Light; Lines and Perspective; and Urban Lines and Colors), the author suggests some of the questions we should ask ourselves when observing a landscape. We will learn how to tell a story while painting, prioritizing color ratios and graphic elements over faithful representation in the final result. Through these engaging exercises, readers will soon be able to manage compositional line and color effectively as they experiment with different drawing, painting and landscape representation tools and techniques.

1. Born in
   Paris, painter Juliette Plisson lives on the outskirts of the French
   capital, where she also has her studio. After working as an architect from 1990
   and earning a postgraduate degree in Theories and Aesthetics in Architecture in
   1995, she began her career as a painter in 2007. Inspired by urban images
   observed in her professional activity, her painting, abstract at first, focuses
   on forms, matter and colour, themes which structure her work in drawing as
   well. In 2010, she ventured out into the street, focusing on her surroundings
   and recording it on paper, before joining the Urban Sketchers movement in 2011.
   Over the years, drawing, mainly in ink and watercolour, has enriched and
   nourished her work as a painter. The city, its denizens and the landscape are
   her favourite subjects for her oil, ink and watercolour work. Juliette
   Plisson regularly exhibits her sketches and paintings in Paris and other
   parts of France.