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

A single drop of water sits on white paper, domed and clear, catching the light so convincingly you half expect it to roll off the sheet. It is colored pencil. It is also, in the hands of 孟君彩铅, four calm steps in the right order.

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孟君彩铅 — Meng Jun, colored pencil — works out of Hunan, is twenty-nine, and appends to the artist name the least romantic phrase available: 有网课, there are online classes.

There is no mystique on offer and that is the position, not an accident. This is an artist whose real subject is not the drawing but the transferability of the drawing. The finished pieces are handsome and they are not the product; they are the proof that the sequence which made them works, and that somebody else could run the same sequence.

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

Ten Years of Watching People Fail

By his own account he has taught colored pencil online for about ten years and is a contracted colored-pencil author under Douyin’s curated program. Both of those come from him.

What can be seen from outside is the shape a decade leaves on somebody’s teaching. The lessons are not improvised. They have an order, a house logic, and a consistency across a hundred different subjects that only comes from explaining the same principle to beginners several thousand times and noticing, repeatedly, the exact place where they go wrong.

That is the difference between an artist who films themselves working and a teacher. An artist shows you what they did. A teacher has already watched you fail and built the lesson around the failure.

The Four Steps

The lesson the channel is known for is the zero-basics water drop, and the method is startlingly plain.

Lay a base color. Separate light from shadow and place the cast shadow. Strengthen the contrast to bring out the reflected light. Finish with a crisp highlight. Four moves, in that order, and a droplet appears.

What makes it more than a trick is that the same skeleton runs underneath everything else he teaches. Base, structure, contrast, highlight — whether the subject is a heart-shaped drop, a strand of horse mane, the sheen on an orange or the glaze on a rib. He is not publishing a hundred tutorials. He is teaching one idea, a hundred times, on progressively harder material.

第一步：铺底色

One of the water-drop tutorials is captioned with a number. Step one: lay the base color.

It is the least interesting instruction he gives and the one most often ignored, and skipping it is why a great many colored-pencil drawings never recover.

A base coat is a light, even, unmodulated pass of a single color over the whole object before any modeling begins. It looks like nothing. The drawing after it is a flat silhouette in a pale wash, less impressive than the outline was, and every instinct says to get on with the shading.

Two things happen if you skip it.

The first is that the paper white survives everywhere it was not deliberately covered, so the finished object is full of tiny white pits that read as dust. Covering them later is much harder than covering them first, because by then the surrounding areas have layers on them and cannot take the pressure needed.

The second is worse and less obvious. Without a base, every subsequent judgment is made against white paper, and white paper is a liar. A red that looks correctly saturated against blank white will look weak and thin once the surrounding area is filled in, because the eye judges saturation by comparison. Painters know this and lay a toned ground for exactly this reason. A base coat is the same device, done one object at a time.

Lay it first and the whole drawing is being judged against the field it will actually live in. That is the entire content of the boring step.

Why a Drop of Water Is Almost All Paper

The droplet deserves its own explanation, because of all the things a beginner wants to draw it is the one that looks most like magic and is most nearly a logic puzzle.

A water drop is a lens. It does not have a color. What it has is a set of behaviors: it darkens at the top rim where the surface curves away, it goes almost invisible in the middle where you are seeing straight through it to whatever it is sitting on, it throws a bright caustic — a small concentrated pool of focused light — into its own cast shadow, and it carries one hard specular highlight where the light source reflects off the dome.

Nearly all of that is achieved by leaving the paper alone. The beginner’s instinct is to draw the drop, which means outlining a shape and shading inside it, and that produces a gray blister. The correct move is to draw everything around and under it and touch the drop itself almost not at all. His four steps quietly enforce that: by the time you reach step four the highlight is already there, because it is paper you never covered.

Everything Glistens

Look at the subjects and a pattern comes clear. A braised rib on a fork, catching the light along the sauce. A roast drumstick with a wet sheen down one side. A sausage on a stick. A slice of watermelon with beads of moisture on the cut face. An orange segment, translucent and shining. Red lips. A pepper with a hard gloss on its shoulder.

Almost every object he chooses is wet, and that is not an appetite for food photography. It is a choice about where colored pencil is at its most and least forgiving at the same time.

A specular highlight — the small, hard, near-white shine on a wet or waxy surface — cannot be added in colored pencil. There is no white pencil that goes over layers of color and comes out brighter than the paper; wax over wax just makes a pale cloudy patch. The highlight has to be reserved: the paper is left untouched from the very beginning and everything is built around it.

Which makes it a planning discipline rather than a rendering one. Before any color goes down — before you know whether the drawing is going to work at all — you have to decide exactly where the shine will be, how big, what shape, and with what kind of edge. And then you have to protect those few square millimeters through every subsequent layer, because one careless pass across one of them and the object stops being wet forever.

Get it right and a piece of glazed meat looks genuinely edible. Get it wrong and no amount of skill anywhere else in the drawing will save it, which is presumably why he keeps setting himself the problem.

A Braised Rib, in Colored Pencil

Now the part that makes this artist unlike the fifty others working in the same medium.

Scroll the work and the fruit is all present — watermelon, oranges, tangerines, strawberries, plums, peaches, an apple, a bell pepper, a morning glory, a blue butterfly, a pair of lips, a zongzi, a horse. And sitting among them, drawn with exactly the same seriousness: a braised pork rib. A roast duck leg. A grilled sausage on a stick.

Nobody draws these. There is a reason, and it is not squeamishness.

Fruit is a solved problem. An apple is a sphere with skin on it: the form is known before you start, the light behaves the way light behaves on a sphere, and a student who understands one round thing understands all of them. That is why every colored-pencil channel on earth runs on fruit.

Cooked meat has no geometry at all. A rib in glaze is a lumpy, irregular mass with no describable form to fall back on, wrapped in a wet caramelized film whose highlights do not follow the surface in any orderly way — they scatter, randomly, in dozens of tiny hard flecks, and that scatter is the entire signal that tells the eye the thing is wet and hot rather than brown and dry. You cannot construct it from a solid. You can only observe it, and then reserve several dozen minuscule highlights before you have laid a single stroke, because there is no white to put back afterwards.

Teaching that to somebody with no foundation is an act of nerve. It is also, quietly, the most useful thing on the channel — because a student who can draw a duck leg is no longer dependent on the object being a sphere.

Two Characters That Set the Whole Curriculum

零基础. Zero foundation. It appears in the title of lesson after lesson, and it is the constraint everything else is built to satisfy.

A zero-foundation student cannot be told to observe more carefully, because they do not yet know what to look for. They cannot be given a principle, because principles only make sense once you have made the mistake they prevent. All they can be given is an order of operations short enough to remember and reliable enough to survive being followed badly.

Four steps is about the limit of what a person can hold while also trying to hold a pencil. He appears to know that.

美院技法 — Claiming the Serious End

Much of the work flies the banner of 美院技法, academy technique, and the choice of words is doing work.

Colored pencil has an image problem in serious art education — it is the medium of hobbyists and children’s sets, the thing you use before you graduate to oil. Filing beginner tutorials under academy technique is a claim that the foundations here are the same foundations: color relationships, the behavior of light, the construction of believable volume. It says the medium is small, not the thinking.

The Red Seal in the Corner

Every finished piece carries a small red seal-style label naming the subject — 苹果, 西瓜, 排骨, 桃子 — in the manner of a collector’s stamp on a Chinese painting.

It is a tiny piece of art direction and it does two things at once. It makes a scroll feed of loose studies read as a series rather than as output, and it borrows a piece of visual authority from the classical tradition and lends it to a stick of colored wax. The medium may be Western and modern; the presentation is deliberately not.

Let the Audience Set the Brief

One habit tells you most about how he works: he has invited followers to post reference photographs in the comments, promising to pick good subjects and build lessons around them.

That inverts the usual direction of an art channel. Normally the teacher decides what to demonstrate and the audience receives it, which means the curriculum drifts toward whatever is convenient to film. Letting the audience set the brief guarantees he keeps meeting problems he has not already solved on camera — which is probably how a duck leg ended up next to the strawberries in the first place.

One Object, Centered, on White

The composition never changes. A single object, roughly centered, on untouched white paper. A soft shadow beneath it. The red seal at the top right. Nothing else — no cloth, no table edge, no second object, no background.

Over a hundred sheets, one layout.

That is a deliberate refusal, and it is what turns a scroll of studies into something a student can actually use.

With the frame held constant, the object becomes the only variable. Put the watermelon next to the pepper next to the braised rib next to the butterfly next to the water drop, and what you are looking at is not a collection of pictures but a comparison of surfaces — here is what wet meat does with light, here is what a waxy skin does, here is what a translucent membrane does, here is what a chitinous wing does. Any difference you can see between two sheets is a difference in the material, because nothing else was allowed to differ.

Compose them differently and that vanishes immediately. A watermelon on a blue cloth beside a knife is a nicer picture and a much worse reference, because now the reader cannot tell whether the color of the flesh comes from the flesh or from the cloth beside it.

It also removes every place to hide, which is the same principle running through everything else on the page. There is no cloth to be brilliant on. There is one object, in the middle, and either the surface is convincing or it isn’t.

One Idea, A Hundred Times

What is being built here is not a portfolio and not really a library of tutorials. It is a single method, stress-tested in public against progressively less cooperative subjects until it stops being a trick and starts being a way of seeing.

Base, structure, contrast, highlight. It works on a drop of water. It works on an orange. It works, improbably, on a rib in glaze — and the day it works on the rib, the student learns the thing the four steps were always for: the sequence does not care what the object is.


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