Artist Han Han / 韩韩彩铅 (hanhan187hh): A Veteran Art Teacher's Colored Pencil Beginners' Guide
A long vine hangs down the paper, and on it more than a dozen little tomatoes at every stage of ripeness: green, yellow, orange, pink, deep wine red. Most are finished, each with a bead of water on its skin. The last one at the bottom is only a pink outline. A row of colored pencils lies across the top of the green cutting mat, and Han Han picks up a red one.
The Artist
韩韩彩铅 — Han Han, colored pencil — is a color teacher from Shaanxi. She has taught in classrooms for sixteen years and has had around three and a half thousand students, and she also teaches live online from time to time. Her own drawings are small, bright studies of things you could find on a kitchen table or in a garden: tomatoes on the vine, grapes, lychees, persimmons, mooncakes, a ladybird on a leaf.
Each one is chosen so that a beginner could draw it too.
A Color Teacher
Han Han doesn’t describe herself as a drawing teacher. She calls herself a 色彩 teacher — a teacher of color. In Chinese art education those are two separate subjects with separate exams. 素描 is drawing: structure, value, form. 色彩 is color: how hues sit beside each other, warm against cool, how a shadow picks up the color of whatever is bouncing light into it, how to keep a picture together when every object wants to be a different color. Sixteen years of teaching that is a real specialism.
The Medium That Can’t Mix
Which makes her own choice of medium interesting. Colored pencil can’t be mixed on a palette. With paint, a color teacher can try two colors side by side, look, and adjust before anything touches the picture. With colored pencil, each pencil is one fixed color. The only way to get a color you don’t own is to lay one thin layer over another and let the eye blend them. There is no test sheet; the first layer goes straight onto the drawing, then the second, and only then do you find out whether the stack landed where you meant it to.
Planning the Layers
That turns color into planning. The orange of a loquat is not one pencil. It is yellow underneath for glow, orange over it for the fruit’s own color, red in the half that turns away from the light, and a touch of violet or green in the deepest shadow so it doesn’t go muddy. Each of those choices is made before the first stroke.
Her one-minute water-drop lesson shows the idea in miniature. On a row of colored squares — yellow, orange, green, violet, cyan, blue, pink — she adds a drop of water to each. On the pink square: first find a darker version of the same color and draw the drop’s shadow side, then press a white pencil into the top to make the light, and finally strengthen the edge and let it fade downward. A flat patch of color suddenly has a bead of water sitting on it.
The Green Mat
She works on a green cutting mat with a printed grid under the paper, and the pencils she is using lie beside the drawing. The grid works like a ruler; the pencils show the palette. Nothing about how the picture is made is hidden, which is exactly what you would expect from someone who wants you to go and try it yourself.
A Vine of Tomatoes, From First Mark to Last
The tomato vine is her color teaching in one picture. Each tomato is a different problem. The green ones need yellow underneath so they glow rather than look flat. The pink ones are built from light pink up to a stronger rose. The dark wine-red ones get their depth from layers of red and violet, not from black. The yellow and orange ones keep a lot of bare paper for light.
She works fruit by fruit down the vine. For the last tomato she draws the outline in pink, then lays in a light orange-red, then a stronger red on the shadow side, pressing a little harder where the fruit curves away. A small highlight is left as clean paper, and a drop of water goes on the skin the same way as in her water-drop lesson.
When it is done, the vine reads like a ripening calendar from top to bottom — and every tomato on it is something a beginner can copy on its own.
Everything Is Edible or Alive
Run down her subjects: blueberry cake, mooncakes, peeled tangerine segments, watermelon, loquats, mangosteen, crabapples, a basket of guavas, a bag of strawberries, a strawberry tart, peppers in three colors, an iced summer drink, a wine bottle and glass. Then a ladybird on a leaf, a swallowtail butterfly, a daisy, a pot of succulents, a parrot. Now and then, a small landscape.
Why Fruit Works
Colored pencil has one real advantage over other portable media: glow. Because color is built from many thin layers, light passes into a finished passage, through several films of pigment, and back out again. Fruit flesh, petals, insect wings, citrus segments, wine in a glass, the icing on a cake — her whole subject list is a list of things light goes into and comes back out of.
Her grapes show it. Each grape starts as a violet circle, then a darker violet on the shadow side, then a white pencil worked over the top to soften the light and give the skin its bloom. Some grapes stay cool blue, some warm toward pink-red, and the bunch looks as if light is shining through it. Her lychees get an orange base and then dozens of small red bumps, layered one by one, before a white pencil picks out the shine. Her persimmons hang from a twig with a pale frost of bloom on top and a drop of water on the skin.
Small Enough to Finish
Each of these studies isolates one skill. A grape is a lesson in translucency. A glazed cake is a lesson in reflected light. A ladybird’s back is a lesson in pattern following form: the spots have to bend with the curve of the shell or the beetle goes flat. None of them takes a week. Each leaves a beginner holding a finished picture they’re pleased with, and that is what brings a nervous learner back to the desk tomorrow.
The Calendar
Her work follows the seasons. Mooncakes appear before the Mid-Autumn Festival. Pumpkins gather in autumn. Iced drinks arrive in summer. Persimmons turn red. A seasonal subject has a practical side for her students too: it is something they can find on their own table this week.
A Daisy Against Rust
One study breaks her usual pattern: a small white daisy growing beside a bolt in a sheet of rusted metal. For a color teacher it is a deliberate challenge. Rust isn’t brown; it is a broken field of orange, violet and gray-green that changes every centimetre. And the white petals against it aren’t white either. They pick up orange from the metal on their undersides and stay cool where they face the sky. Getting that right takes exactly the kind of thinking she teaches for a living.
The Red Seal
On several finished sheets she presses a small red seal into the corner, the way a Chinese ink painting is signed — on a mooncake, a rose, a parrot, a slice of strawberry cake. It says the drawing is finished work, not a study. It also works as color: often it is the one fully saturated red on the page, placed off to one side to balance the subject. Sixteen years of teaching color, and the last mark on the drawing is a color decision.
A Teacher at Heart
Han Han doesn’t just show finished work and move on. She sets homework and offers to look at what comes back. She teaches live when she can. She treats the people learning from her as students to be guided rather than an audience to impress, which changes everything for someone just starting out.
Colored-pencil fruit and flowers are well-trodden ground, and she isn’t trying to reinvent them. What she brings is structure: subjects that each teach one skill, taught step by step and then checked, with the rigour of a real classroom behind them.
Picture the green mat again at the end of the afternoon: a vine of tomatoes, each a different color, each with its bead of water, and a red pencil laid back down beside them.
See her work on Douyin: 韩韩彩铅 (hanhan187hh) · tomatoes on the vine · water drops in one minute · grapes · persimmons. All artwork and video © 韩韩彩铅, shown with credit.