
Photo: Marcello Barenghi/Facebook
By the time 2013 rolled around, Marcello Barenghi found himself “unemployed and with nothing to lose”, so he decided to go back to the thing he liked to do the most – drawing hyper-realistic versions of everyday objects. He set up a YouTube account and started uploading video tutorials of himself drawing things like soda cans or fruits. In his first year as “youtuber”, Marcello got 100,000 followers. Today, he has 2.1 million subscribers, which makes him one of the most popular artists on YouTube. Marcello spends several hours on a single project, which, truth be told, doesn’t seem like a lot, considering just how good his drawings look. One of the things that set him apart from most artists is that he doesn’t sell his artworks, ever. “Of each and every drawing I realized, I could say I’m not completely satisfied with it, but also that I love it so much I could never part with it. In fact, I don’t sell them,” Marcello Barenghi told American Express Essentials. “Every one of them is the result of a challenge which I loved to take on and overcome: the gold of the World Cup trophy, the transparency of the glass, the weave of fabric. I love them all, each of them has its own peculiarity.” Over the years, we’ve featured some truly amazing hyper-realistic artworks on Oddity Central, but there’s no denying that Marcello Barenghi’s drawings are some of the best. In fact they qualify as optical illusions.