Alessandro Marrella
Latest posts
Water and Fire
Exercise drawing natural elements
Eye studies
There is no room for the fourth lol
Affresco
Sunday evening study
Monet - les meules - master study
Pettirosso
Leopard in watercolor
At the end of a watercolor class I was taking, the assignment was to draw anything we wanted. I didn't have any idea and begged the instructor to give me one... He said: draw a cat looking out of a window, well...
Sketch of Rebecca Dautremer at Lucca Comics 2025
Lucca Comics was what started it all . 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.
Autumn in watercolor
Back to it after a long break.
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Started 3d scanning my apartment undergoing renovations. Using RTAB-Map which is opensource and uses the iPhone Lidar (yes some phones have lidars!)
Spider Drawing
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.
Dog in the Rain Drawing
Pita really doesn't like rain
Samoyed Drawing
Say hi to Arya
Chihuahua Drawing
Say hi to Milo :)
Self Portrait in Watercolor - Isola d'Elba
Hello from the Isola d'Elba, Italy!
Statue Head Drawing
Asparagus Drawing
A mask, a bird wooden sculpture and a drawing
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
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Went to GDG Pisa DevFest today, favorite talks: Flutter and Game development: where to begin? : a talk by Mirko Raimo on how to use the Flutter Casual Games Kit and Flame Crafting digital twins in Rust : a talk by Gianluca Insolvibile on how to build actors in Rust using type-driven design. Dietro le quinte dell'animazione, il ruolo del technical director : a talk by Silvia Raggi on the role…
A small exhibition
Really proud of doing a small exhibition today after taking a few watercolor classes @ Imago Pisa :)
Pita on the couch, watercolor sketch
Asparagus in watercolor
Inspired from this Pinterest
Couch sketch
Avoiding select * in BigQuery
A quick workaround to avoid people doing "SELECT *" on your tables (which I consider harmful, see stackoverflow ) in BigQuery is the following: Create a policy tag in the policy tags page . I create it under a new taxonomy "sql_rules", and call it "no_select_star" Once created, in the policy tag taxonomy page I enable the "enforce access control" option. If you need users to bypass this policy…
Bear drawings
My dog in watercolor
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. It's messy but I like it.
Setting up SSH in 1password for both authentication and git signing
I recently had to set up a new Mac for programming. I took the opportunity to do what a colleague suggested me to do a long time ago: ditch gpg, gpg-agent, and such in favor of 1Password. This setup is much simpler and I believe more secure than what I was doing before. Creating a SSH key for authentication in 1Password and connecting it to Git # Enable the 1Password SSH Agent. In 1Password go to…
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Just a quick update: I know I haven't being posting in a while, between end-of-year work, holidays, flu, and back to work I didn't have much time. Will go back to posting some tech stuff and drawing stuff soon.
Drawing of a drying rack
Lights, Shadows and my self portrait a month later
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". This was another mind blowing chapter for me, I always regarded…
Drawing a Profile Portrait
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. Here is my reference from…
Perspective and sighting
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. One point perspective In one point perspective, all lines that are…
Negative spaces
I did some exercises from the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards book around negative spaces. 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... Negative spaces in…
Foreshortening exercises
For a non-native speaker, even the word "foreshortening" wasn't immediately intuitive, so I'm going to post its definition for posterity: foreshorten : to shorten by proportionately contracting in the direction of depth so that an illusion of projection or extension in space is obtained ( Merriam-Webster ) The "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" book by Betty Edwards makes you do an…
Another upside down drawing
I've done another upside down drawing like here to focus on when "R-mode" activates. (hover to flip) 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!
DRSB: R-mode vs L-mode
In the "Crossing Over from Left to Right" chapter, the "Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain" book I'm following (see drawing ) gives you an exercise: you have to draw "Portrait of Igor Stravinsky" by Pablo Picasso, upside down. So this image: But instead of drawing it by looking at it straight, it's flipped over, like this: This is designed to make the "left side" 1 (the verbal,…
DRSB: Pre-Instruction Drawings - self portrait, my (zombie) hand & more
As mentioned in the previous post 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! I bought both the book (2012 "definitive" edition) and the associated workbook, the exercises are…
Intro: Trying out Drawabox and... pivoting
As mentioned in drawing I've decided to embark this journey of learning to draw, inspired by a random workshop 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). I don't have the confidence necessary to show up at a drawing course in Tuscany…
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A friend showed me anyhow today for Rust. Got to clean up a lot of unwraps and expect! (I’m writing a CLI app, i don’t need custom handling for every error)
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I started a new hobby: learning to draw. Attempting that with the drawabox course and “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” from Betty Edwards. Drawabox seems very good from a technical point of view but maybe a bit boring, so i bought that book too which is supposed to be more fun. We’ll see how far I can get!
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I randomly ended up in a Masterclass by Tyler Jacobson today at Lucca Comics. And by randomly i really mean i walked into the wrong place… but it ended up being the most interesting thing i did today! His deep dive on how art works for designing fantasy worlds and characters was great. Also learned technical things like contrast > value > temperature > color. Super interesting
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I'm (back) on BlueSky 🦋 at @alessandromarrella.com . Looks a bit more populated now!
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Tried to get Claude to play Neuralink's webgrid game using their demo container on computer use . It started off great but then the cursor looked off target. Still really fun and exciting tech! See the video on YouTube
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datamodel-code-generator is a really useful python library for generating python types out of a openapi/graphql schema
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OpenAI's Realtime API + function calling will enable some really cool use cases like controlling UIs completely with our voice, or completely voice-first applications.
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Internal tooling deserves a good UX too. The UI can be rough, but tools need to do the job well while minimising frustration and footguns.
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Just found out you can use emojis as favicons directly. This utility can generate the code.
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val.town is really cool. I was able to quickly add a “backend” to push thoughts to this static site
BigQuery Editions vs On Demand
These are some notes on the tradeoffs and best practices between On Demand pricing vs Editions pricing. Pricing models # BigQuery currently offers two very different pricing models Editions # With Editions you are charged for "compute time" by slot-hour. A slot is a virtual CPU that BigQuery uses to execute queries. Within Editions, you can purchase a "committment" for a lower price if you always…