Artist Kang Sir / 康Sir彩铅 (kangsirart): Two Hundred and Thirty Hours for One Portrait
A lion looks straight out of the sheet against a deep orange-red ground. Its mane falls in hundreds of separate strands, gold at the tips and dark brown underneath, and the whiskers are fine white lines across the muzzle. A hand rests on a strip of white paper laid over the bottom of the drawing to keep it clean, working on one last patch of fur under the chin.
The Artist
康Sir彩铅 — Kang Sir, colored pencil — is a colored-pencil artist and teacher based in Liaoning who runs online classes in realistic colored pencil. He is plain about what his drawings are for: 作品均为网课范画 — every piece is a demonstration drawing for the online course. In Chinese art teaching, a 范画 is the model piece a teacher makes so that students can see exactly where a lesson ends up.
His subjects range widely: a lion, a sleeping cat, purple roses, a blue hydrangea, cupcakes and jelly sweets, a white horse, and portraits taken from film, games and sport — Kobe Bryant, the monkey hero of Black Myth: Wukong, characters from the Ne Zha films. Many of these are drawn from existing images, as model pieces usually are. The point is not the invention of the picture. It is showing, step by step, how far careful colored pencil can go.
The Tools First
One of his earliest lessons is not a drawing at all. It is a tour of his materials: a drawer packed with loose colored pencils in every color, sorted roughly by hue; a tray of shorter, well-used stubs; a color chart, filled in swatch by swatch, so that each pencil can be found by the color it actually makes on paper rather than the color painted on its barrel; and a portrait in progress beside it.
He names his materials openly: a 150-color set of Prismacolor pencils and heavy watercolor-grade paper cut to 16K, roughly A4 size. For a beginner that is useful information. Realistic colored pencil depends on soft, waxy pencils that can be layered many times, and on paper with enough tooth to hold all those layers.
Fur, Strand by Strand
The lion shows the core of his method. Fur is drawn as direction, not as color. The underlayer goes down first in warm browns, following the way the hair grows. Then lighter strands are laid over it, each a single stroke of gold or cream, and the darkest strands go in last between them, so that the mane has depth. The background is laid down in solid, burnished layers of red and orange until the paper’s grain disappears, which makes the soft edge of the mane look even softer against it.
He has written of it: 有些画，总不舍得结束 — some drawings you never want to finish.
Two Hundred and Thirty Hours
The piece that defines his patience is a portrait of Kobe Bryant in his purple Lakers jersey, which he made as a tribute — 致敬曼巴, a salute to the Mamba. By his own account, it took 230 hours. That is roughly six working weeks on a single face.
Colored pencil is a slow medium at the best of times. A realistic face takes hundreds of thin layers, each one adjusting the color a little, because pencil can’t be mixed on a palette the way paint can. Skin is the hardest case: the warm brown of the cheek, the cooler shadow under the jaw, the reddish tones around the eyes and the small, sharp highlights on the forehead all have to be built up layer by layer without the surface clogging. A portrait at that level is a test of the medium as much as of the artist.
He has returned to the same face more than once, in different sizes and at different stages. Every version makes the same argument to a student: the distance between a beginner’s drawing and this one is time, not magic.
A Monkey King in Gray Fur
The portrait of the monkey hero from Black Myth: Wukong is a long lesson in two textures side by side. The face is drawn in warm orange-brown, its wrinkles and furrows built up with darker reds and browns, the eyes heavy-lidded under a scowling brow. Around it, the fur is gray and white, laid down in long, fine strokes that fan out from the face. Under the chin, a twisted rope collar is drawn strand by strand, each twist of fiber with its own shadow.
The order matters. He works outward from the brow and the eyes, where the likeness lives. The beard and the rope collar are left for later, because they depend on what they surround: their color and direction only make sense once the face is in place.
Eyes First
The Ne Zha portrait begins with almost nothing: a faint outline and then, right away, the eyes. They are drawn sharp and finished before anything else — the dark rim, the iris, the glint of light. Then the red mark on the forehead, then the cheeks in soft peach and rose, built up smoothly until the face looks rounded. The hair buns go in last, in solid black with a cool gray sheen across them, and a red ribbon to finish.
Starting with the eyes is a teacher’s choice. If the eyes are right, the student has a reason to keep going for the hours the rest will take. If they’re wrong, everything built around them will be wrong as well.
Half a Hydrangea
A blue hydrangea is a lesson in repetition without monotony. Each small flower in the head has four petals, and there are dozens of them, overlapping. He draws them one by one, in a range of blues from pale sky to deep ultramarine, with a few touches of violet and green where the light changes. The petals at the front are sharp and bright; those deeper in the cluster are darker and softer. Midway through, half the flower head is finished and the other half is still a pencil outline, and the difference shows exactly how much the color is doing.
He likes to joke that his flowers get mistaken for prints — and that when a while goes by without anyone saying so, he feels a little let down.
Sweets, Roses and a White Horse
The gentler lessons are just as carefully built. Cupcakes with swirls of cream and a cherry on top teach soft gloss. Small jelly sweets teach transparency: the color has to be strongest at the edges and lightest where the light passes through. Purple roses teach how a petal curls back on itself, light on the outer edge, dark in the fold. A white horse is drawn for luck under the line 祝大家马上有钱 — a pun on 马上, meaning both “on horseback” and “right away”: may you all get rich right away.
A Dragon King
Ao Guang, the dragon king from the Ne Zha films, is drawn on a white sheet laid on a dark wooden desk. The face is pale and sharp, with a red line at the lips and cool gray shadows. The long hair is built up in layers of icy blue and teal, each strand a single stroke, flowing back from the face, and the ornate horns and armor are drawn last, with highlights left as white paper.
Raising the Ceiling
Realistic colored pencil is usually taught with small, quick subjects, because they finish fast and students stay encouraged. Kang Sir teaches those too: a cupcake, a jelly sweet, a single flower. But he also puts the 230-hour portrait right next to them. That tells a beginner something important: the gap between the two is time, not talent, and anyone who has finished the cupcake is already on the road.
What a Model Drawing Is For
Every piece here is a 范画, made to be shown to someone who is about to try. That is a modest way to describe six weeks of work on one face, and it is also the whole idea. The lion, the roses, the portraits — none of them were made to hang in a gallery. They were made so that a student starting a class can see, before buying a single pencil, exactly what patience looks like at the far end.
See his work on Douyin: 康Sir彩铅网课 (kangsirart) · lion · Black Myth: Wukong portrait · half a hydrangea · Ao Guang. All artwork and video © 康Sir彩铅, shown with credit.