Artist Meng Jun Colored Pencil / 孟君彩铅 (aa4671338): Four Steps to a Drop of Water

A patch of soft teal hatching sits in the middle of a white sheet, nothing more than color laid down in one direction. Then a pencil draws a small oval inside it. The top of the oval goes dark, the bottom stays light, a shadow is pulled out to one side, and a white pencil touches a single bright point near the top edge. The patch of hatching now has a drop of water sitting on it.

The Artist

孟君彩铅 — Meng Jun, colored pencil — is a colored-pencil artist and teacher based in Hunan. Meng Jun is a contracted colored-pencil author with Douyin, has been teaching colored pencil online for ten years, and runs online classes, with enrolment open.

The work is almost entirely lessons. A strawberry, a ginkgo leaf, a peach, a slice of watermelon, a tiger, an otter, a lotus bud, a cat: each one is drawn from a blank sheet to a finished piece, step by step, as a lesson for people who have never drawn before. Most finished drawings carry a small red seal in one corner with the name of the subject written in it — 草莓, strawberry; 西瓜, watermelon; 排骨, spare ribs — like the collector’s stamp on a Chinese painting.

Portrait of Meng Jun Colored Pencil 孟君彩铅, Douyin artist aa4671338

A Drop of Water in Four Steps

The water drop is the lesson Meng Jun returns to most often, and the method fits in one line. 第一步：铺底色 — first, lay the base color. 第二步：找光源，画投影 — second, find the light source and draw the cast shadow. 第三步：加强对比，承托反光 — third, strengthen the contrast and hold up the reflected light. 第四步：点高光 — fourth, dot in the highlight.

In one lesson, two finished drops sit at the top of the sheet as examples, one gray and one red. Below them, the teal patch goes down first. The drop’s outline is drawn into it with a sharper pencil. The upper part of the drop is darkened, because the drop is a lens and the darkest part sits on the side facing the light. The lower part is left pale, where light passes through and gathers. The shadow goes on the side away from the light. Last, the white pencil: one hard point of white, and the drop stands up off the paper.

Five Steps for a Watermelon

The longer lessons follow the same logic with one more step. A slice of watermelon is labelled as it goes: 起型, find the shape, in a light red and a light green line; 铺固有色, lay the local color, red on the flesh and green on the rind; 区分层次明暗, separate the layers of light and dark; 深入刻画, render in depth, with the seeds, the darker red where the flesh is cut, and the pale band between flesh and rind; 调整画面, adjust the whole picture. A white pencil is worked over the red at the end to give the flesh its grainy, juicy surface.

Why the Base Color Comes First

Step one is the easiest instruction and the one beginners skip most. A base coat is a light, even layer of one color over the whole object before any shading starts. Without it, two things go wrong. The white of the paper shows through every gap between strokes, so the object looks speckled. And every later judgment about how dark or how strong a color should be is made against bright white paper, which makes everything look stronger than it is — until the white is covered and the drawing turns weak.

With the base down, the drawing starts in the middle of the value range. Light is added by leaving things alone or by lifting with white, and dark is added on top. The drop is the clearest demonstration: it is barely drawn at all. It is the base color, made a little darker on one side and a little lighter on the other, with one point of white. Most of what makes it look like water is the paper and the patch around it.

Water on Every Color

A drop takes its color from whatever it sits on, so the same four steps are repeated over different grounds on one sheet: a drop on blue hatching, a drop on red, a drop on a green leaf, a heart-shaped drop on orange, a drop on violet. The point is that the method doesn’t change. Only the colors do: the dark inside the drop is a deeper version of the ground, the lit part is a paler one, and the highlight is always white.

美院技法 — Academy Technique

Meng Jun calls some of these lessons 美院技法, art-academy technique: the still-life method taught to students preparing for China’s art academies, brought to beginners. The 粽子 lesson is the best example. A 粽子 is a pyramid of sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and tied with string, and this one has a piece of glossy braised pork on top.

It starts as a light outline of the pyramid. The pork is drawn first, because it is the brightest and most saturated thing on the sheet: layers of fat and lean in orange, red and deep red-brown, with white highlights left on the glaze. Then come the leaves, in olive and gray-green, their veins drawn in long strokes that follow the folds. The rice showing at the edges is warm off-white, made of tiny dots and short marks. The string is drawn last, crossing over everything, with a small shadow where it presses into the leaf.

Food Drawn to Be Eaten

Food is a large part of the work: braised ribs, red-braised pork, a duck leg, a grilled sausage, chicken wings, a peeled tangerine, longans, a tomato, a red chili. Each one teaches the same thing: how to tell a reader’s eye what a surface feels like. A glaze is drawn with hard-edged white highlights and dark, saturated color right next to them. Fruit flesh is drawn with soft transitions and small dots of light. The skin of a peach is drawn without any hard highlight at all, so it reads as fuzz.

One Horse, Hair by Hair

The horse is a much longer lesson. It begins with a few light lines: the long head, the ears, the eye, the line of the jaw. Then the coat is laid in with a reddish-brown pencil, in strokes that follow the direction of the hair — down the nose, round the cheek, along the neck. The white blaze down the face is left as paper, with only a few cool gray strokes to give it shape.

The color is built up in layers: chestnut, then darker brown in the hollows above the eye and under the jaw, then near-black in the nostril and the eye. The mane goes in last, in gray and dark strokes that fall the other way across the neck. The eye is the most important part. It is drawn very dark, with one small white highlight, and it is what makes the head look alive rather than drawn.

Fur is the main lesson here: a coat is not drawn as one color, but as hundreds of strokes that all follow the same direction and change slowly from light to dark across the form.

零基础 — Zero Foundation

The two characters that run through the lessons are 零基础, zero foundation. Everything is built for someone who has never drawn before. That person can’t be told to look harder, because they don’t yet know what to look for. What they can be given is an order of operations short enough to remember and reliable enough to work even when it is followed imperfectly: base, light and shadow, contrast, highlight. Four or five steps is about as much as a person can hold in mind while also holding a pencil.

The subjects are chosen the same way. One object, centered on a white sheet, under a clear light, with a shadow to anchor it. A strawberry, a drop, a slice of fruit. Nothing in the background, so nothing distracts from the one thing being taught.

The Cat

The cat is drawn the way the horse is: a few faint guide lines, then the eyes first — clear blue, with a dark pupil and a bright highlight — then the pink nose. The fur grows outward from the face in fine strokes, cream on the muzzle, warm brown on the ears and around the eyes, the colors blending as they meet. At the end, the drawing has a face that looks back at you. It is the same four-step idea again, taken a long way: base, light and dark, contrast, and the highlight in the eye.

See Meng Jun’s work on Douyin: 孟君彩铅 (aa4671338) · water drop in four steps · watermelon · 粽子 with braised pork · cat. All artwork and video © 孟君彩铅, shown with credit.

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