Artist 画彩铅的鲤鱼 (42761563157): The Colored Pencil Realist Who Draws Light Through Fruit
A lychee, peeled. The skin lies beside it in a red curl and what is left is a wet, half-lit globe of flesh with a dark seed floating somewhere inside it — and every bit of that is wax pencil on white paper, laid down by a thirty-two-year-old in Hunan who signs herself the koi.
The Koi Who Draws in Colored Pencil
She goes by 画彩铅的鲤鱼 — the koi who draws in colored pencil — and the carp is not a decorative choice. In Chinese, the koi is the fish that swims upstream and, at the end of a long climb against the current, turns into a dragon. It is the emblem of the slow, unglamorous ascent, and it is exactly the promise she makes to strangers on the internet: 从小白到大神, from complete blank to great master, with someone beside you the whole way.
Colored pencil is the right medium for that promise, and she knows it. Nobody has to be given permission to own pencils. There is no easel, no solvent, no drying time, no expensive failure. A person can begin on a kitchen table with twelve colors and produce something they are not embarrassed by, which is not true of oil paint and is barely true of watercolor. The medium’s low door is the whole reason her school exists.
What she has built on top of that door is unusual. Most people who draw well online sell the spectacle of drawing well. She sells the far less glamorous idea that the spectacle is reducible — that a strawberry has a number of steps, and the number is seven.
Hunan, Thirty-Two, and a Cat for a Face
Her province is Hunan and her stated age is thirty-two. That is very nearly the whole of the public record. Her profile picture is not her face; it is a cat wearing a hat.
The anonymity is not coyness, it is method. A teaching channel that runs on personality asks the student to admire the teacher. A teaching channel with a cat for a face asks the student to look at the paper, because there is nothing else in the frame to look at. Every video is shot from directly above: a sheet, a hand, a pencil, and the object being drawn sitting beside its own portrait so you can check the work against the world in real time. She has a recurring title for exactly that comparison — 我看到的vs我画的, what I saw versus what I drew — and it is the most honest heading in art education, because it invites the audit rather than dodging it.
画彩铅的鲤鱼 on Douyin · frost-tipped succulent study · rendering of a millennium-old museum wood carving · grape study · portrait of a young girl · lotus blossom
What Wax Cannot Do
To understand what she is actually good at, you have to understand the one thing colored pencil is physically incapable of.
Colored pencil is pigment suspended in wax or oil and pressed onto the surface of a sheet. It sits on the paper. It does not sink in, it does not pool, and it does not glaze. Watercolor and ink get their inner glow for free: the paper is white, the pigment is thin, light travels down through the wash, hits the sheet, and comes back up through the color. That returning light is what the eye reads as depth inside a surface.
Wax gives you none of that. Worse, the instinct that makes a beginner press harder — to get the color rich, to get it finished — is the instinct that destroys it, because pressure burnishes the tooth of the paper flat and seals it. A heavily worked passage of colored pencil is slightly shiny and completely opaque. It looks like plastic. It looks, precisely, like a sticker of a fruit rather than a fruit.
The Peeled Lychee
Now look at what she chooses to draw.
A peeled lychee, twice. A shelled longan, its flesh so thin you can see the seed through it. A blue gemstone pendant on a chain. A skewer of 糖葫芦 under its glassy shell of hardened sugar. An ice cream sundae. A fried egg — the yolk domed and lit from within, the white a cloudy, half-transparent film. A strawberry, over and over, which is a fruit whose entire visual character is that light gets a millimeter into it before turning back red.
Every one of those is a translucency problem. She has chosen, as her signature subject, the exact category of thing her medium is worst equipped to render.
The solution cannot be additive, so it is a discipline of refusal. The flesh of the lychee is built from many extremely pale passes at low pressure, each one leaving the tooth of the paper open so the white beneath keeps reading through the color — a manufactured version of the glow that watercolor is given for nothing. The seed behind it is laid at full pressure, dark and closed. The gap in pressure between those two areas is the entire illusion; the eye reads the open, breathing layers as light passing through a body and the closed, burnished ones as a thing light cannot enter.
Then, and only then, the specular hit on the wet surface — the one place she is permitted to commit, laid hard and small against everything she has been careful not to fill in.
This is a difficult thing to teach, because what she is asking a beginner to do is to stop. To leave a passage looking weak and unfinished for four layers longer than every instinct demands. Restraint is the least demonstrable virtue in a video, and it is the one her entire body of work depends on.
Seven Steps to a Strawberry
Her answer to that teaching problem is to count.
彩铅画七步搞定草莓 — seven steps and the strawberry is settled. 彩铅六步画出板栗 — six steps to a chestnut. 彩铅6步画宝石质感 — six steps to gemstone texture. The numbers are the point. A perceptual problem that feels like talent is converted into a countable procedure with a beginning and an end, so a student who is failing knows which step they are failing at rather than concluding that they cannot draw.
It also quietly enforces the restraint. If pale layering is step two of seven, the student cannot skip it to get to the satisfying part, because there are five more steps waiting and the sequence has already been agreed.
A Fried Egg, a Zongzi, a Bronze from Sanxingdui
Her subjects sprawl in a way that looks undisciplined and is not. Chestnuts split open to the yellow flesh. Plums with the bloom still on them. Grapes, bananas, cherries, a persimmon. Cakes, tarts, blueberries under dripping sauce. A zongzi still in its leaf. Then succulents by the dozen, hydrangeas, a lotus, orange lilies, a classical Dutch-style floral arrangement. A peacock, a panda, a toy poodle with a football. A single human eye. Small girls in floral collars, and a doll in pink.
And then, sitting oddly and wonderfully among the fruit, the museum pieces: the bronze standing figures of Sanxingdui with their verdigris crust, and the downcast wooden face of a Buddha a thousand years old.
Those museum drawings are the range’s outer edge and its justification. Patina is the hardest possible colored-pencil subject, because corrosion is a chemical accident — mottled, unrepeatable, and layered over a metal that is still trying to reflect. There is no formula for three thousand years of oxidation. She draws it anyway, and in doing so answers the accusation that always follows a channel full of fruit: that the realism is a trick with a narrow range. It is not. Fruit is simply where the students are.
What She Refuses to Teach
Ask most online instructors what to buy and you will get a shopping list, because equipment content is easy and it sells. She goes the other way and refuses the brand question almost entirely.
What she teaches instead is color selection and color handling — how to choose the hues a subject actually needs, and how to make them behave once they are on the sheet — and how to get from an accurate line drawing to a fully modeled finish without losing the accuracy on the way. Those are the two failure points that account for nearly every ruined colored-pencil drawing, and neither of them can be bought.
From Complete Blank, One to One
The free demonstrations are the front door; behind them is a real school. She teaches through Douyin and Xiaohongshu and runs her paid courses on CCtalk — themed classes on flowers, on flower-and-bird subjects, on animals; a comprehensive course built around a run of worked examples; and a year-round practice program of livestream replays and set assignments.
The structure tells you what she thinks matters. Permanent replay access, so a slow student is never timed out. High-resolution reference images, because you cannot draw what you cannot see. Homework returned with comments in the class group, because the difference between a tutorial and a teacher is that a teacher looks at your attempt. The whole thing is priced in the low hundreds of yuan — the price of a good set of pencils, which is not an accident.
Let Drawing Become Part of Life
Her slogan is 让绘画融入生活: let drawing dissolve into daily life. It reads as a pleasantry and is in fact a curriculum decision, and it explains the fried egg.
An artist who wanted to be admired would draw the Sanxingdui bronze every week. She draws breakfast. She draws the snack on the stick outside the station, the longan in the fruit bowl, the strawberry on the counter — the argument being that if the subjects stay within arm’s reach then the practice does too, and the person who draws what is in front of them today is still drawing next year. Grandeur is a bad habit for a beginner. Availability is the whole game.
The Long Companionship
The word in her promise that does the real work is 陪伴 — to accompany, to keep company with. Not instruct, not coach. Accompany.
It is an unusual thing to sell, and it describes what she has actually built: a body of drawings that make an impossible-looking skill look plainly reachable, cut into steps a person can count, taught by someone who will read your homework and stay on the other end of it while you climb. The koi becomes a dragon at the end of a long swim upstream. Nobody in the story mentions how much of that swim is simply not stopping.
Biographical note: 画彩铅的鲤鱼 publishes under a studio name. Her province and age are as stated on her own channel; no real name, formal training, exhibition or award record is publicly documented, and none is claimed here.