Alessandro Marrella - drawing

Sketch of Rebecca Dautremer at Lucca Comics 2025

2025-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Lucca Comics was what started it all</a>. I went back this year, and this time I went just to see the artists. Rebecca Dautremer was the resident artist and I had the luck to see her painting.</p>

Spider Drawing

2025-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

This cool fella was sleeping on the wall just above the bed. I moved him but i took a picture and drew him before letting him go free.</p>

Dog in the Rain Drawing

2025-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Pita really doesn't like rain</p>

Samoyed Drawing

2025-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

Say hi to Arya</p>

Chihuahua Drawing

2025-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Say hi to Milo :)</p>

Statue Head Drawing

2025-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Asparagus Drawing

2025-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

A mask, a bird wooden sculpture and a drawing

2025-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

As part of a drawing class I'm taking, I had to create a composition between a 2d drawing and a still life drawn in class. I've used graphite for the still life and colored pencil for the 2d. Here is the result. A bit scary :D </p>

Couch sketch

2025-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Bear drawings

2025-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

My dog in watercolor

2025-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

I started taking an amateaur illustration class, yesterday we learned a bit about watercolors so I decided to give it a go drawing Pita, my dog.</p>

It's messy but I like it.</p>

Drawing of a drying rack

2025-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Lights, Shadows and my self portrait a month later

2024-12-09T12:00:00+00:00

The "last" chapter (there are actually two more, but they are more about applying creativity to other fields and some concluding remarks on finding the artist within you) of the "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" book by Betty Edwards focuses on perceiving lights and shadows, also known as seeing things in terms of "values".</p>

This was another mind blowing chapter for me, I always regarded this part of drawing as something subconscious, and also simply I couldn't really understand how to use lighter or darker tones to give the idea of tridimensionality. </p> </span>

Steichen: Self-Portrait</h3>
The first exercise of the book is to draw the face in the "Self Portrait" by Edward Steichen</a>. That's a really cool picture, where half of the author's face is completely in shadow, and yet our brain makes us almost see that part of the face. The book here teaches also how to use the eraser as a drawing tool (if you tone the paper, you can achieve the "lightest light" by erasing some parts of the drawing).</p>
Here is my drawing: </p>
The drawing is not as dark as the original image, because I didn't have anything to tone my paper up to that darkness. But I think I captured the idea and I'm happy with the result. My wife's comment to this drawing was: "who's that, Voldemort?", which is not what I was going for but I found pretty funny!</p>

Cross Hatching</h3>
The book briefly mentions cross hatching in this chapter as a way to control lighter and darker values. I was curious so I did an exercise on this technique following this tutorial on youtube</a>.</p>
Here is the result: </p>
This was very quick and measures are not super precise, but I like how it ended up looking. This looks like something I can quickly practice in my day to day as well so will do more of these.</p>

My Self Portrait</h3>
This is the "final" drawing of the book, where you are supposed to apply everything learned. Coincidentally, I ended up drawing this a month later my first self portrait, so it's a good way to check a month's progress.</p>
And this is the result: </p>
The left one was done on the workbook, which I ended up not using much, and the right one on my sketchbook. I'm mind blown by the progress. I need to work on the facial features more, as sometimes still the symbols for eyes and mouth take precedence over what I "see" but I'm really really happy with the result.</p>
What's next?</h3>
This is the end of the "book", but just the beginning of my learning. I got what I wanted from this book, which is to give me a method and confidence to start drawing more. I bought two more books, which will arrive on Wednesday, and if I like them will be the base of my next learning exploration. But in the meantime, I have a lot of things I can explore on my own and every day I cannot wait for the moment I can sit down and draw something. I love the state of mind this puts me in, and I like that I'm learning something way out of my comfort zone. I'll also start a in person course end of January, can't wait! </p>

Drawing a Profile Portrait

2024-12-09T11:00:00+00:00

Last week I worked on the second last chapter of Betty Edwards' book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain". This chapter focused on drawing a face by profile. The book asks to draw a person from life but I couldn't find anyone wanting to model for me so I drew Taylor Swift from a picture. I know it's not the same thing, but for now that will do.</p> </span>

Here is my reference from Pinterest: https://pin.it/3skhAQsGU</a></p>

And here is my drawing (I know it doesn't look much like her): </p>

I think the main issue with this drawing is the proportions, especially the nose. I'll need to do more studies on facial features in the future (among all the other things :) ).</p>

Also, this drawing still looks a bit "flat" despite the toned paper, but next chapter of the book is about that.</p>

Perspective and sighting

2024-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

This week I did a few exercises on perspective. I feel like it was easy enough to get ok results, but it's really hard to reach really good results. I practices both one and two point perspective. I didn't do three points yet because apparently it's only used if you are looking down or up a tall building.</p> </span>

One point perspective</h2>
In one point perspective, all lines that are perpendicular converge into one vanishing point on the line of sight, while horizontal and vertical lines that are parallel to the frame stay the same. This is a useful perspective to use to draw a long room, like a hallway, or a street, but can be used pretty much anywhere you are facing something frontally.</p>
I drew the hallway in my apartment: </p>
This drawing is not one I'm particularly proud of. I should have polished it a bit more though, and should have done the floor and the furniture better, but I think perspective is okay there for most things. I'll need to exercise more, perhaps the subject I chose bored me a little.</p>

Two point perspective & sighting</h2>
In two point perspective, lines converge to two vanishing points on the line of sight, usually outside the picture. This is useful for angled perspectives, like drawing a corner of a room, a square, or anything where you want a bit of tilt really. I found this a bit more difficult to do, as you now need to track of two points. </p>
Also at the same time here to keep proportions realistic, I started doing "sighting" with my pencil and arm to measure proportions. Essentially I was holding the pencil with my arm straight and locked, closed one eye and measured with my thumb the size of something (say a side of a window) compared with something else. I didn't do it exactly for everything, but for some details that were important to me I did it.</p>
I did two attempts at drawing the same scene (a corner of my living room). I abandoned attempt #1 after realising that my perspective was a bit wonky and fixing it would have meant erasing a lot.</p>
Here they are:</p>

Attempt 1</h3>

Attempt 2</h3>

Reference photo</h3>
I did the drawing live, but might be helpful to get the context to see a photo of what I was trying to draw.</p>

That's all for perspective for now. As with everything else I'll need to exercise more, but I like this approach of exploring different aspects of drawing first, so next step will be drawing people by profile.</p>

Negative spaces

2024-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

I did some exercises from the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards book around negative spaces.</p>

A "negative space" is roughly everything that's not a "positive form" (i.e. an object or a person or a phisical part of a person). It can be the space between the fingers of a hand, the space between two objects, the space between the legs of a chair, etc... </p>

Negative spaces in drawing are very "real" and not taking them into account makes the drawing composition look wrong. Betty Edwards through the book teaches to use the negative space to turn off the "L-mode" of the brain: because negative spaces share a border with positive forms, if you draw them you will end up with the positive forms drawn too, with the advantage of having your brain "switch off" the little voice that tells you that a hand should be drawn a certain way.</p>

i I've partially made use of the negative spaces concepts in my foreshortening exercises</a>, but here I'm taking them a step further by focusing on them directly.</p>

I've done three drawings with this focus: </p>

A chair in my living room</li>

A copy of "Child Seated in a Wicker Chair" by Winslow Homer</li>

A copy of "Studies of Arms and Legs" by Peter Paul Rubens</li> </ul>
A chair in my living room</h3>

You can see how many negative spaces there are to draw! For this exercise, the book also tells you to define a "one", i.e. a small part of the chair that will drive the proportions of the rest. I drew a small negative space corresponding to one of the sections below the chair on the viewfinder, copied it on paper, and then drew the rest of the chair. This process took me a few hours, but I'm pretty happy with the result!</p>
Child Seated in a Wicker Chair</h3>

If you are unfamiliar with the reference, this is the original piece</a>. This was very hard! I still have to learn about setting values, and clearly here it would have helped. Also I couldn't get the face of the child right despite my many attempts! This took me like 6 hours... the result is not great, but at least I think I did ok on the negative spaces of the chair.</p>
Studies of Arms and Legs</h3>

I drew this upside down first, and then flipped it and refined some details. Again, here is the reference</a>. Here I think I did quite well, especially the legs. You can see how negative spaces (e.g. the one between the legs) here are really important to get right also for the foreshortening effect.</p>
That's all for this time. I already started studying perspective (the next chapter in the book), but I'll blog about it later.</p>

Foreshortening exercises

2024-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

For a non-native speaker, even the word "foreshortening" wasn't immediately intuitive, so I'm going to post its definition for posterity:</p>

foreshorten</strong>: to shorten by proportionately contracting in the direction of depth so that an illusion of projection or extension in space is obtained (Merriam-Webster</a>)</p> </blockquote>
The "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" book by Betty Edwards makes you do an exercise of portraying your hand, foreshortened. </p>
First, the book asks you to mark it on a piece of plastic called "viewfinder" (I'm using the one included in the workbook, but it's really something that can be made at home) like this: </p>
It already looks pretty good! By drawing the trace on the viewfinder, you are not tricked by the preconceptions on what a hand should look like, so you can really draw it as it looks.</p>
Then, you have to draw your hand on paper, using your real hand as a reference (in the same pose as the viewfinder mark), with the possibility of looking at the viewfinder too.</p>
The hand represented in the viewfinder above came up like this:</p>
I'm pretty satisfied with the result. The next step would be to do it without a viewfinder (or as the author puts it, use an "imaginary" one).</p>
Bonus content: I've actually done another pose before this drawing, which came up quite decent too but I didn't have the viewfinder photo of that so I'm just posting it at the bottom here:</p>

Another upside down drawing

2024-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

I've done another upside down drawing like here</a> to focus on when "R-mode" activates.</p>
(hover to flip)</p>
</div>
It doesn't look exactly right everywhere as anatomy is a bit off I think, and I left too many marks, but I was expecting worse! </p>

DRSB: R-mode vs L-mode

2024-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

In the "Crossing Over from Left to Right" chapter, the "Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain" book I'm following (see drawing</a>) gives you an exercise: you have to draw "Portrait of Igor Stravinsky" by Pablo Picasso, upside down.</p>
So this image:
</p>
But instead of drawing it by looking at it straight, it's flipped over, like this:</p>
</div>
</span>
This is designed to make the "left side"^{1</sup> (the verbal, analytic, symbolic side) of the brain less active and activate the right side (which focuses holistically on shapes and relationships). </p>}
By doing the drawing upside-down, I obtained this result:</p>
</div>

Which when turned right way up it looks like this:</p>
</div>

I don't think it looks bad at all! I'm personally surprised by the result. That's probably the best drawing I did in my life! As you can notice, the most awkward parts are the hands, and a bit of the mouth. Here my left side "recognised" the shapes even when upside down, and was really trying to get them to be drawn how it knew. The whole drawing took me 3 hours (the book recommended 1 hour, but I had to erase and re-do things to adjust proportions and relationships between lines a few times).</p>
This was another fun exercise. The book recommends to do another one upside down before continuing. I'll do it in the next few days when I have time.</p>
^{1</sup>. Science doesn't agree with the right-side vs left-side, but it's a useful simplification wherever this activity happens. Also the author of the book is on the same page, and calls it L-mode and R-mode to avoid controversy.</small>
</div>}

DRSB: Pre-Instruction Drawings - self portrait, my (zombie) hand & more

2024-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

As mentioned in the previous post</a> I've just started learning to draw with the "Drawing On The Right Side of the Brain" book by Betty Edwards (https://www.drawright.com/). I haven't done any "lesson" yet but the book asks to do a few pre-instruction drawings, so here they are! </p> </span>
I bought both the book (2012 "definitive" edition) and the associated workbook, the exercises are slightly different. So I did both :D I did the self portrait first because I looked at th workbook assuming that the order was the same, but here I'm presenting them in the order that the book required them (though I'm not sure here order matters a lot).</p>
The homework</h2>
A person, drawn from memory</h3>
The book first asks to draw a person from memory (this one is not in the workbook). I decided to draw my grandma. I don't see her very often, but her image is quite clear in my head I think.</p>

</p>
The drawing doesn't look at all like my grandma! But I think I captured a bit the "idea" of her: she's tiny, she's sweet, and she's a bit fatigued by all the work she did helping raise us (i might not have captured that well, but i kinda tried to raise her shoulders a bit to mean that). </p>
Self-portrait</h3>
Then the book asks to do a self portrait in front of a mirror. This is also an exercise in the workbook, so I did it on the workbook.</p>

</p>
This drawing isn't exactly how I look like either, but it's much closer. Being able to draw and look at the thing you are drawing at the same time is easier. I think this technically is called "drawing from reference". </p>
My hand</h3>
Third drawing from the book, this one is also on the workbook too.</p>

</p>
This is probably the drawing I'm least proud of, I couldn't get the proportions right! Even if faces are more complex, I guess we are used to look at them more than hands. Maybe I chose a pose that was too difficult as well. Anyway, the end result is the one above, a bit zombie-ish.</p>
A corner of a room</h3>
This one wasn't on the book, only on the workbook.</p>

</p>
I think I like this one. Proportions are not crazy off, and I feel like the corner is recognisable. The strange thing on the bottom right is a small "stair like" shelf, where there are a few fake plants, some tarots and a few small board games. In the bottom left there is a corner of a couch, and a little red IKEA cart we use that contains some useful stuff for the living room. I like the window, I think it's close.</p>
Looking at the drawings</h2>
As mentioned, I'm a beginner and these are pre-instruction drawings. The book asks to look at the drawings closely. I've written a few notes above about the individual pieces, but in general obviously there is a lot of room for improvement, and definitely drawing from reference feels a lot easier than from memory, so I'm happy with the choice of this book, because I feel like this approach is a more manageable way to learn.</p>
The book also explains that the reason for the memory drawing is to make you notice the "symbol system" that you learn since childhood: a nose looks like this, a mouth like this, etc. Even in the self portrait, sometimes the symbol system was stronger than the reference, and despite me erasing and redrawing it kind of forced itself on the piece. One of the things that the book promises to teach, is how to train perceptual skills that would make me able to set this symbol system aside. I'm really looking forward to that!</p>
And with this, I finished my pre-instruction work. I won't deny this was fun to do, but I think the real fun will begin now!</p>

Intro: Trying out Drawabox and... pivoting

2024-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

As mentioned in drawing</a> I've decided to embark this journey of learning to draw, inspired by a random workshop</a> I walked into accidentally at Lucca Comics, and seeing all the beauty of that world with fresh eyes (I went to the festival for the "Games" part, but was really fascinated by the illustration part).</p>
I don't have the confidence necessary to show up at a drawing course in Tuscany (just feel the pressure of being in the land of Da Vinci and show up to a course there 😬), so I decided to look online for the next best thing (the blessing of living in this day and age is that you can find everything</em> on the internet). </p> </span>
I browsed Reddit, and in the /r/learntodraw</a> community I found that people suggested Drawabox</a>, a free website (with optional patreon subscription if you want feedback) that focuses on the technical side of drawing. In the homepage, the author explicitly states that the approach is tough, but since I am a beginner I felt like everything would be though just the same, so I tried the first lesson.</p>
The goal of this lesson is to initially just draw lines, how hard can that be? </p>
Well, first of all, it turns out that drawing smooth lines is a physical challenge: the author requires you to use your whole arm to draw, so not just the wrist or the elbow, your pivot needs to be on the shoulder! There is a very good reason for that, using the shoulder allows to maintain a straigher trajectory (see the pivots</a> chart here). Using the shoulder tough is definitely not intuitive if you are not used to it, I kept over and over wanting to use my elbow or my wrist. And I guess that's the whole goal of these exercises, learn a new habit and replace old ones.</p>
The lesson then follows with good content on markmaking, explaining what marks should look like: unbroken (no "chicken scratching"), smooth and have a consistent trajectory. All simple, and yet hard concepts to grasp.</p>
Then there is some homework, where the author asks to apply what has been learned so far. There are 3 exercises:</p>

Produce 2 sheets with lines drawn freehand superimposed on a line drawn with a ruler. Here the challenge is to avoid wobbling and fraying when doing so.</li>
Produce 1 sheet with "ghosted" lines, where you draw a few points on the sheet and connect them, but before doing so you "ghost" the movement without making a mark a few times, kinda like aiming.</li>
Produce 2 sheets of °ghosted° planes, where you draw planes (the shape, not the flying object) </li> </ol>
Here is my homework:</p>
</div>
As you can see, there is a lot of room for improvement! </p>
After doing this exercise though I did a retrospective: was this what I was looking for? </p>
While interesting, I don't think this is the best thing to start with for a complete beginner, so I went back to the drawing board (hehe) and decided to opt for a more beginner friendly resource. The Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain</a> book by Betty Edwards. This is not free, but I felt like it was worth exploring this path in my pursuit of this quest. I think that's more beginner friendly because it seems to focus on developing observational skills, which at least to me is the main barrier to entry (at this stage I don't care how smooth my lines look, I first want to capture what I want to draw more accurately).</p>
And here we are, at the time I'm writing this post I already did one "pre-instruction" drawing and I'm excited to continue! I'll post about it soon.</p>
PS. With regards to Drawabox, I think it's a really cool resource, and it's amazing that's available at all! I'm going to pick that back up when I'll get a little better with the "right side" book, which for now seems more suited to my needs.</p>