I visited a Tintin shop in Belgium and was amazed by the variety of products and specially by the quality of the figures. Whoever did the sculptures, they’ve managed to recreate the cartoon style in all figures. They look like they came out of the books.

I was selected to study with Roberto Ciabani, from Istituto Galilei. In my first class I told him I had no problems drawing people, but I often got stuck trying to draw buildings and landscapes. So we decided I should practice drawing some architectural things and I started sketching the Duomo.

Well, if you have seen the Duomo you know how detailed and complex it is. What was supposed to be just a study turned out to be an extremely demanding work. After some sketches I came up with this drawing. I didn’t want to use a ruler thus the lines are all crooked and the circles are far from perfect.

After some corrections I transferred the drawing to a watercolor paper. I used a Fabriano paper, incredibly good. Buying paper in Florence was one of my best experiences in Italy. This is the first layer of paint:

This is when it started to get really interesting. My first watercolor teacher used to say I should mix all colors first and save them, because it was hard to find the same tone later. Roberto, in the other hand, asked me to mix small amounts of color and apply them layer by layer. 

And after a couple of days I finally finished the painting. I was really happy with the result, specially considering this was my first test with architectural painting. This work is far from the beauty of the Duomo.