Contemporary Watercolour on the Go : Capturing the Essence of a Place. Shapes, Gestures and Colour in Direct Watercolour

Experiment this new, intuitive approach to watercolour without using any preliminary drawings to paint directly with a brush with this on-the-go workshop and its more than fifty progressive exercises.

This book is an excellent tool for learning to sketch on location. Through the "no drawing first" technique, readers will learn to use only watercolour and a brush to draw in notebooks, make quick urban sketches, keep visual journals and create compelling outdoor urban work. Designed like a workshop on the go, with more than fifty progressive exercises, this book invites you to experiment with watercolour by translating space and movement through shapes and color into masses and values rather than contours and strict rules of perspective. The author, a theatrical scenic painter, urban sketcher and urban sketching teacher, shows you how to represent the world around us. She encourages the reader to observe the place, to understand it, to learn how to choose the subject when capturing the place’s soul, preserving the sense of the fleetingness of the instant described. The themes include vegetation, buildings and forms of people in movement.

With a degree from the E.N.S.A.D (Higher National School of Decorative Arts, Paris, France) in scenography in 2000, Marion Rivolier began to work as exhibition designer and theater scenographer. After an internship at the Louvre Museum, she collaborated with several agencies where she developed permanent (museums, entertainment trails, leisure parks) and temporary projects. At the same time, she started painting on the spot directly with a brush without preliminary sketches. She exhibits her work regularly in France. Marion has run the Urban Sketchers Paris collective since 2012, for which she develops cultural projects, particularly with the French charity Secours Populaire (winner of the USk Community Grant Program in 2019), the CMN (Centre des monuments Nationaux/National Monuments Centre) and the Prison de la Santé (Stately Prison at Santé Street, Paris). Since 2002, she has taught sketching at the School of Architecture in Marne-la-Vallée, France.