Five hundred and thirty-five lessons, and ten of them carry two-thirds of the applause.

The Artist’s Journey

李正素描 — “Li Zheng Sketch” — publishes on Douyin under the ID 24966966996, from an account whose IP location is shown as Guangdong. As of August 2026 the profile carries approximately 851,500 followers, 5.2373 million cumulative likes and 535 published works. The biography is one line long, and it is a self-description rather than a credential: he presents himself as the founder of a studio called 彩虹画室 (“Rainbow Studio”) and as a long-serving front-line instructor for China’s fine-arts college entrance examination, the 美术高考.

Beyond that line, the public record thins out fast. No real name is confirmed anywhere — “Li Zheng Sketch” is the name he is known by online, and nothing in the searchable record establishes that Li Zheng is the name on his identity card. No age, no hometown, no city more specific than the province the platform assigns to his connection. A search for a business registration matching “Rainbow Studio” returns nothing that can be tied to him; several studios share the name, and none of them can be linked to this account. What exists instead is the work: 535 videos, arranged into playlists, made over a period long enough for the earliest of them to be several years old.

From Exam Room to Feed

The one piece of biography he does volunteer is a set of numbers, and it is the kind of number an art-exam teacher in China would consider a résumé in itself. According to his self-reported Bilibili profile, he placed 185th nationally at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, 22nd at Tsinghua University’s Academy of Arts & Design, 45th at the China Academy of Art and 26th at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. No year is given, no major is specified, and none of it has been independently verified. He also claims to have worked as a lead artist or art manager at several publicly listed companies; that too rests on his own account.

Whether or not those rankings can be checked, they explain the shape of everything he makes. China’s art-exam system trains candidates to build a head from measurable proportions under time pressure, and that is exactly the pedagogy he exports to a general audience: not “here is a beautiful drawing,” but “here is where the line goes, and here is why.” The transition visible in the account is not from studio artist to influencer. It is from a classroom method to a feed — the same lesson, restructured so that a stranger with no training can follow it in ninety seconds.

The Graphite Discipline

His signature is a construction method rather than a mark. Before a single feature is drawn, the head is reduced to geometric volumes — a sphere for the cranium, a block for the jaw, cylinders for the neck and limbs — and only once that scaffold reads correctly does the pencil begin to describe skin and hair. He calls it 用几何形体来画, drawing with geometric solids, and the video that states the method most plainly is also his second most-liked post, at 651,100 likes. A male-profile version of the same lesson sits in the top ten at 96,600.

Layered onto the geometry is the older proportional canon that every Chinese art student learns as 三庭五眼 — the “three courts and five eyes,” which divides the face into three equal vertical bands and five eye-widths across. He returns to it constantly under the heading 五官定位, feature positioning, and an entire playlist of 24 episodes is devoted to nothing else. The pencil work itself is unshowy: mid-range graphite, soft even gradients on the planes of the face, hair built in dark masses first and lifted afterwards, edges deliberately kept simple so that a beginner copying along can see the decision being made.

Faces, Hair, Hands: The Subjects

Scroll the grid and the subject matter is unmistakably chosen for a feed. The overwhelming majority are portrait heads of young women — three-quarter and profile views, short bobs, braids, long hair caught mid-movement — with a steady secondary run of handsome male faces in the same register. Around them cluster the parts that beginners find hardest: hair, hands, and expressions. There are dedicated lessons on drawing a hand that will hold up in a portfolio, on a hand catching a butterfly, on surprise, on laughter, on the battle-worn look that anime fans call 战损.

The rest of the range fans out from there. A 24-episode animal series has drawn 6.74 million plays. There is a human-anatomy playlist of 32 episodes, a 16-episode run on hair alone, a small floral set, and an anime-and-game strand that peaked in early 2025 with pencil renderings of Nezha and Ao Bing during the film’s run. He also uses hashtags such as #抖音插画大赛, #GAF广州插画艺术节 and #抖音青年艺术家计划 on individual posts — platform campaign tags, not marks of selection or award, and no record of participation or recognition in any of them could be found.

The Douyin Breakthrough

The account’s engagement is a textbook power curve, and the arithmetic is worth stating exactly. Across all 535 works the average post earns roughly 9,800 likes. The single biggest — a profile-view female portrait tutorial — has 1,086,600, which is more than a fifth of everything the account has ever earned. The top ten posts between them account for about 3.48 million of the 5.24 million lifetime likes: 1.9% of the catalogue, two-thirds of the applause. Below the twelfth post the numbers fall into the tens of thousands, and among recent uploads a typical figure is in the low hundreds.

The playlists tell the same story from a different angle. His flagship portrait series, 李正素描人像系列, runs to 299 episodes and roughly 300 million cumulative plays; a 37-episode quick-sketch companion has 29 million. That is the compounding half of the model — a body of work that keeps being found long after it was posted — sitting alongside a feed where most individual uploads pass almost unnoticed. Both halves are real, and describing only one of them would misrepresent him.

Media Recognition and the People’s Verdict

There is a genuine gap here, and it is more interesting than a list of prizes would have been. Searches turn up no press coverage, no interviews, no exhibitions, no awards, no publications and no professional-association roles attached to this account. That is not evidence that none exist — Chinese art-world records are patchily indexed and much of the sector’s activity never reaches the searchable web — but it does mean the article cannot claim otherwise.

What can be observed is a second, independent audience. Search results indicate a same-named Bilibili account with approximately 296,000 followers and a portrait-drawing collection of nearly 300 tutorials, where the geometric-solids portrait lesson has drawn around 1.24 million plays and a hair-rendering tutorial around 1.19 million. The same two topics that carry Douyin carry Bilibili. That cross-platform agreement is the strongest verification available: whatever the biography turns out to be, the demand for this specific teaching is not an artefact of one recommendation algorithm.

Innovation Within Tradition

Nothing in his method is new. Geometric blocking is Renaissance workshop practice by way of Bargue and Loomis; 三庭五眼 is centuries old; academic graphite portraiture is the most conservative discipline in Chinese art education. The innovation is entirely in the packaging, and it is more deliberate than it looks.

Every thumbnail carries the same bold yellow Chinese title card — 教你画…, “I’ll teach you to draw…” — stamped over the finished drawing, so the promise and the proof occupy the same frame. Every lesson is compressed to between one and three minutes and pitched explicitly at 零基础, absolute beginners. And the subjects are chosen from what a general audience already wants to draw — pretty faces, anime characters, cats — rather than from the plaster casts and still-life arrangements of the exam room. The academic content is smuggled in under popular subject matter. A viewer who arrives for a Nezha drawing leaves having been taught the same head-construction sequence an exam candidate would practise for months.

Artistic Philosophy

He does not state a philosophy anywhere, so it has to be read out of the work — and the work is consistent enough that it can be. The governing conviction is that drawing is a procedure, not a gift. Nothing in his teaching depends on inspiration or talent; every video begins by locating something measurable, and the drawing that follows is presented as the consequence of getting the measurements right. Titles like 画的太抽象了，那该怎么画？ — “it came out too abstract, so how should you draw it?” — treat a failed drawing as a diagnosable problem rather than a verdict on the person holding the pencil.

The second conviction is that the barrier to entry should be removed rather than defended. There is no gatekeeping in the tone, no appeal to the authority of the academy, and no suggestion that the viewer needs permission to begin. A 31-episode playlist is titled, roughly, “taking apart drawing’s stubborn ailments.” That framing — the teacher as troubleshooter, the beginner as someone with a fixable problem — is the account’s most consistent idea.

Legacy and Continuing Influence

Judged by the criteria the art world uses — exhibitions, collections, critical writing — there is nothing here to assess, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Judged by the criterion that actually applies to him, the influence is substantial and measurable. A 299-episode portrait course with 300 million plays has almost certainly taught more people to place a pair of eyes correctly than any single Chinese art school did in the same period, and it did so free, in ninety-second instalments, to an audience that mostly had no intention of taking an exam.

He is also a clean case study in what algorithmic distribution does to art instruction. The method that made him — reduce the head to solids, position the features, then render — is the oldest content in the discipline. The reason it reached 851,500 people is that he learned to present it in the exact shape a recommendation feed rewards. Whether that counts as a legacy depends on what one thinks teaching is for; the drawings his viewers post back in the comments suggest it counts for something.

The geometry was never the point. It was only ever the thing you could hand to a stranger.