Artist Art Hacker / 艺心骇客 (39351589909): Trompe-l'oeil Illusions and Glowing Colored Pencil
The sheet is black. A white pencil draws one thin bright line down the edge of a forehead, over a nose, across two lips and under a chin. An orange pencil follows it, then a yellow one, and loose strands of hair catch fire above the face. Nothing inside the face is drawn at all. It stays black paper, and it looks like a woman standing with the sun behind her.
The Artist
艺心骇客 — roughly “Art Hacker” — is a Shanghai-based artist who describes the practice in one self-mocking line: 尝试着各种不同画风画法，画风不专一的画渣 — trying all kinds of different styles and methods, a “painting-nobody” whose style won’t stay put.
That is accurate, and it is the point. The work runs from colored pencil on black card to markers on red paper, ballpoint pen, watercolor, and drawings that seem to lift off the page. The subjects run from portraits to anime characters to a glass ball, a diamond and a perfume bottle. Very little of it looks like it was made by the same hand. What ties it together is a love of effects: each piece is an attempt at something a flat sheet of paper isn’t supposed to be able to do.
Light on Black Card
The artist’s most distinctive work is on black. 黑卡纸才是yyds, as one piece puts it — black card is the greatest of all time — and 彩铅在黑卡纸上能发光: colored pencil can glow on black card.
The fox and the rabbit from Zootopia show how. They stand face to face, seen from the side, almost entirely dark, lit from behind. Only their outlines are drawn: the edge of an ear, the line of a muzzle, the tips of the fur. A white pencil goes down first along every edge, then yellow over it, then orange further out, so the light seems to burn and then cool as it spreads. A little color in the eyes is the only other thing in the picture. The rest of each face is left as black paper.
The glow isn’t in the pencil. It comes from the eye, which judges brightness by comparison. A pale yellow on white paper is just a pale surface. The same yellow surrounded by black is the brightest thing for some distance, and the eye reads it as light.
Building From Dark to Light
On white paper a drawing is built from light to dark: the paper is the light, and every mark makes something darker. On black card that order is reversed. The paper is the shadow, and every mark adds light. The brightest highlight, which on white paper is left untouched, is here the last and heaviest layer of pencil.
The woman seen from the side is built exactly that way. First the hard white rim along the face, as thin as a hair. Then the hair itself: long, loose strands in orange and yellow, each one a single stroke, lit only where it turns toward the light behind her. Then the shoulder and the edge of the collarbone, in a warmer, softer orange, with a little red where the light passes through skin. Last, a few strokes of dim color inside the dark, just enough to suggest the cheek and the jaw without lighting them. The finished picture is mostly black, and that is what makes the edge so bright.
What Black Paper Forbids
The method has a cost. On white paper colored pencil can be layered: a yellow over a blue makes green, because light passes through both layers and bounces off the white beneath. On black nothing comes back from underneath. Every color has to be opaque and placed exactly where it is wanted, because it can’t be mixed on the page and it can’t be lifted cleanly. A wrong mark of bright yellow on black card stays there.
That is why the light on these drawings is so narrow. The artist draws the edge and stops. The temptation is to light more of the face, and the more of it you light, the less bright any of it looks.
Red on Red
The same idea works on colored paper. An anime pilot in a red suit is drawn on a sheet of red Canson paper. The paper does most of the work: it is already the color of the suit. The drawing adds the dark — black marker for the seams, the shadows and the joints of the armor — and then the light, with orange and white pencil along the highlights of the suit and through the long red-orange hair.
Color From the Paper Up
On red paper the figure is built with a thin black marker first: the outline of the face, the eyes, the edges of the suit, all drawn as clean lines. Then the large shadows go in, flat and dark, so the figure takes on weight. Only then does the light come in, a few strokes at a time — a gleam along the back of the suit, the edge of a shoulder, a streak through the hair.
Because the paper is already a strong mid-tone, the drawing never has to fill large areas. It only has to decide what is darker than the paper and what is lighter. That is the same lesson as black card, one step up the value scale. The paper is a decision made before the first mark, and it decides most of what the picture will look like.
The Floating Glass Sphere
One drawing explains the “hacker” in the name better than any other. On a white sheet beside an easel, a glass ball floats just above the paper, with its soft gray shadow lying on the sheet underneath. It is drawn in graphite: the dark rim of the sphere, the reflections of the room bent across its surface, a bright window highlight, and the bright spot of light it focuses into the middle of its shadow.
Then a hand turns the paper, and the sphere collapses into a long, stretched oval. It was never round. It was drawn distorted on purpose, so that it only looks round, and only looks like it’s standing up, from one exact point of view. This is anamorphic drawing, a trick painters have used for centuries, and here it is done with a pencil on a sheet of paper on a desk.
The same trick returns in many forms: a diamond that seems to float in the air, a perfume bottle that seems to stand on the paper at a slant, a drawing on a cardboard delivery box that seems to rise off it, and figures that seem to step out of the lined pages of a notebook.
Three Pens
The materials change from piece to piece, and that is part of the experiment. Markers are used for flat, clean color, and then pushed further — 马克笔上色不单单只能平涂, markers are not only for flat fills — into shading and depth. Ballpoint pen is used in loose, scribbled lines, layered one color over another until the scribble turns into a face. Colored pencil is used for everything else: the glow on black, a giant gemstone, a fish-eye view of an anime singer with an enormous head.
The anime girl with lilac hair shows the pencil at its loosest. The face is drawn carefully — clear eyes, soft pink cheeks, fine strands of silver-lilac hair — and then the costume is built up in open, visible hatching: green and teal for the skirt, black for the jacket, with marker under the pencil where the colors need to be solid. Up close the clothing is all scribble. From a step back it is fabric. That gap, between how a picture is made and what it looks like, is what interests this artist most.
An Appetite, Not a Style
There is no exhibition record here, and the artist claims none. What there is instead is an appetite: for the next material, the next paper, the next trick that a flat sheet isn’t meant to allow. 艺心骇客 calls it having no fixed style. On the evidence, the search is the style, and black card is where it has gone furthest.
Picture the end of one session: a black sheet on the desk, almost empty, and in the middle of it two faces made of nothing but their own bright edges.
See the work on Douyin: 艺心骇客 (39351589909) · floating glass sphere · Zootopia on black card · side-lit portrait · lilac-haired girl. All artwork and video © 艺心骇客, shown with credit.