Artist Baozi / 包子绘画教学 (33116298): Fun, Fast Drawing Tutorials of Everyday Life
A single piece of spicy 辣条 in its little silver wrapper sits on a white sheet. The wrapper’s crimped edges have been drawn with a fine black pen, the foil filled in with gray marker, the snack itself built up in red-brown pencil. Now a yellow pencil dots seasoning across the surface, one speck at a time, and a white gel pen adds the glint where the oil catches the light. Beside the drawing lies the real thing, torn open.
The Artist
包子绘画教学 — “Baozi Drawing Lessons” — is a drawing teacher based in Liaoning with a proper art education behind her. She graduated in fine art from Dalian Polytechnic University and counts more than twenty years of study. She teaches online, and her promise to students is simple: even with zero foundation, you can learn real, professional drawing knowledge. Her own motto is lighter: 享受生活享受当下 — enjoy life, enjoy the moment.
Her subjects are what people actually eat and use: spicy snacks, a bottle of water, candied hawthorns, a roast sweet potato, a bowl of noodles, a mooncake, an ice lolly, a can of cola. Every one is drawn from a blank sheet to a finish that looks good enough to pick up.
The Wrapper Is the Hard Part
In the 辣条 drawing, the snack is the easy part. It is a flat red-brown shape with some texture and some specks. The wrapper is where the skill shows. Thin foil plastic is crumpled and creased in every direction, so each little facet catches the light at a different angle. Some are almost white, some nearly black, and they sit side by side with no pattern. The crimped seal along the edge has its own zigzag rhythm. And through the clear window, the snack has to read as being behind something.
Her order for it is the order of a trained painter. The outline goes down first in a fine black pen: the square of the packet, the waves of the crimped edge. Then the wrapper gets its gray, with the brightest patches left as untouched white paper. Then the snack: a base of red-brown, then richer reds and darker browns layered on top, then the yellow dots of seasoning. Last, dark gray to sharpen the deepest creases, and a white pen for the few brightest points of light.
A Heart, Drawn Two Ways
She likes a joke. 教你画个小心心, she offers — let me teach you to draw a little heart — and then draws a real one: an anatomical heart, with the great vessels curling out of the top in pale cream, and the muscle below built up from pale pink to deep wine red, with fine white highlights along the wet surface.
A Bottle of Water
A plastic bottle of water is one of the hardest ordinary objects to draw, because it is almost entirely invisible. What you see is the table and the paper through it, bent by the curved plastic and the water inside, plus a few sharp reflections.
She starts with a light pencil outline on a sheet clipped to a board, getting the bottle’s ridged shape symmetrical. Then the ridges are shaded in gray, each one a narrow band of light and dark. The blue label goes in next, with the red lettering, and it does a lot of work: seen through the bottle at the back, it is distorted and paler, which tells the eye the bottle is full of water. Finally the brightest highlights are picked out in white, running down the edges of each ridge.
Clear plastic has no rule you can learn once and apply. Every crease and every curve bends light differently, so it can only be drawn by looking, patch by patch. And the highlights have to be planned from the very first layer, because they are white paper and white can’t be added back cleanly once the color is down.
Twenty Years to Make It Look Easy
The training shows most in what she doesn’t do. There is no fussing, no correction, no long build-up of guesswork. Each lesson goes in the same order: a light, accurate outline; a base color; the shadows and the shape; the details; and last, a few highlights. It looks simple because the decisions have already been made — which color goes first, where the light comes from, which highlights to save.
That is what an academic art education gives a teacher. A student of fine art learns still life for years: an apple, a jar, a draped cloth, under one light, over and over. She has kept that method and changed the objects to things her students know and love. A roast sweet potato is a still life. So is a bowl of noodles.
A Grape With Its Skin Peeled Back
A single grape shows the method in miniature. It starts as a sphere, with a deep purple skin peeled halfway back to show the flesh. The flesh is drawn in pale green-gold, with fine radiating lines and a soft inner glow where the light passes into it. The torn skin is drawn in dark violet and magenta, sharply curled, with a thin bright edge where it catches the light. The contrast between the two — dull, thick skin and bright, wet flesh — is what makes it look juicy.
A Brain, for a Joke
Some lessons begin with a pun. 教你画恋爱脑 — let me teach you to draw a “love-brain”, the Chinese phrase for someone who loses their head over romance. What follows is an anatomical brain, drawn in earnest.
It starts as an outline of the two hemispheres, then a flat base of soft pink. The folds go in next, traced as winding lines in a darker rose. Then she builds each fold up as its own small rounded form — light on top, a darker red in the crevice — so the surface turns from a pattern of lines into something solid and wet. White highlights come last along the tops of the folds. A drawer of colored pencils, sorted by color, sits open on the desk beside her.
Sweet, Sticky, Shiny
Gloss is a recurring lesson. 糖葫芦 — candied hawthorns on a stick — are a row of red balls in a clear, hard shell of sugar. A swiss roll needs a soft sponge with a spiral of cream. An egg needs the deep gold of a raw yolk against the clear white. A can of cola needs its cold, wet metal. Each one is a different way of telling the eye what a surface feels like: sharp white highlights and deep color for sugar glass, soft graded light for sponge, small beads of white for condensation.
Something Practical
Under the heading 教你们点实用的 — let me teach you something practical — she draws a 100-yuan note, marked clearly 纯艺术 非1:1绘制: pure art, not drawn at actual size. The pale gray-green paper is laid in first, then the red of the note, then the fine engraved patterns, worked in thin red lines. It is a test of precision rather than of light: straight edges, regular patterns, tiny type. And the joke is the same as ever: something you handle every day, drawn so well that you look twice.
Drawing What Everyone Is Talking About
She draws along with the calendar: a mooncake for Mid-Autumn, Olympic rings during the Games, a portrait of the monkey hero from the game Black Myth: Wukong, finished in three hours. Speed like that comes from experience. Twenty years of practice is what lets a detailed drawing be finished while the thing it refers to is still on everyone’s mind.
Her Students
For all the jokes, this is a teaching practice, and she is proud of the people she teaches. She shares her students’ work often — 我的宝贝学生们的作品, my precious students’ work — and once gathered a whole set of their 辣条 drawings side by side, each one done after her lesson. For a teacher whose promise is that zero foundation is no barrier, that is the real result.
You Can Do This Too
Beginner drawing lessons are nothing new, and she hasn’t invented a new technique. What she brings is a choice of subject and a tone of voice: formal training, pointed at the funny, familiar things of everyday life, in a way that makes having a go seem obvious rather than brave. Under every lesson sits the same short message: you can do this too.
Picture the end of the lesson: a crumpled silver packet on the paper, a red-brown snack visible through it, dotted with yellow seasoning — and the real one beside it, already half eaten.
See her work on Douyin: 包子绘画教学 (33116298) · spicy snack in its wrapper · bottle of water · peeled grape · brain. All artwork and video © 包子绘画教学, shown with credit.