Artist 爱画画的小智 (198606460): The Colored Pencil Painter Who Draws Good Luck
A wicker basket of pomegranates sits on a cracked stone ledge. One fruit has split open, and its seeds spill out red and wet. Every seed, every strand of the basket and every flake of old plaster on the ledge is colored pencil, laid down a little at a time. When it was finished, Xiao Zhi wrote one line about it: 画了18天 — eighteen days.
The Artist
爱画画的小智 — Xiao Zhi, “who loves to draw” — is a self-taught colored-pencil painter from Shandong. There is no art school in his story and no teacher. He learned the way many people now learn: by drawing, watching others work, and keeping at it.
His whole philosophy fits in one easy sentence — 画画嘛，最重要的就是开心啦: when it comes to drawing, the most important thing is to enjoy it.
It sounds light, but it is a hard rule to live by. A single picture of his can take weeks of evenings. The only fuel that lasts that long is enjoying the work itself.
What He Draws
Look across his work and it is mostly red. Cherries heaped in a glass bowl. Braids of red chili peppers tied with string. Dark red roses beaded with water. A polished red apple, pomegranates, persimmons on a branch, koi under lotus leaves, goldfish with veil tails, a betta in a glass of water, little chocolate cakes topped with cherries.
Many of them carry a wish. In Chinese, many everyday things sound like good-luck words, and Xiao Zhi picks his subjects with that in mind.
Eighteen Days of Pomegranates
The pomegranate basket shows how he works. It begins as a faint pencil outline: the fruit, the curve of the basket, the line of the ledge. Then he starts on one pomegranate and carries it almost to the finish before moving to the next. A green pencil lays in the unripe skin; reds and pinks are built over it where the fruit has blushed; the dark shadow between two fruits goes in early so that every later color is judged against it.
The split fruit takes the longest. Each seed is its own small jewel: a deep red edge, a lighter body, and a tiny dot of bare paper left as a highlight so it looks wet. Then come the leaves and a twig, then the basket, strand by strand, each woven band lit on top and shaded underneath.
Last of all is the stone ledge — rough, cracked, with patches of old plaster — and the soft shadow the basket throws across it. By the end there are pomegranates whole, split and fallen, a few loose seeds on the stone, and eighteen days of evenings in one sheet of paper.
Red, the Hardest Color
Red is a stubborn color in colored pencil. Warm reds reach full strength in two or three passes, and then the paper’s tooth fills and the wax goes slick. If the bright parts used up the paper, there is no room left to make the shadows deeper.
His dark roses show the answer. The deepest shadows are not just more red; they are built cool and dark first, and the red sits over them. On the bunch of chilies he keeps a strip of color swatches down the margin of the sheet, each labelled with its pencil code, so he can see exactly which reds and pinks he is stacking.
A Bowl of Cherries Is a Wish
Xiao Zhi doesn’t choose subjects only for their shape. The chilies are 红红火火 — may your life be red and blazing. An apple, 苹果, shares a sound with 平, peace, so an apple is a wish for safety. Persimmons, 柿子, sound like 事, affairs, and stand for 事事如意 — may everything go as you wish. Koi under lotus mean peace year after year, and fish of every kind mean 余, having more than enough. A split pomegranate full of seeds is an old wish for a full and fortunate family.
These are 吉祥话, spoken good wishes, turned into pictures. They belong to a folk tradition as old as New Year paper-cuts, embroidered pillowcases and the picture a grandmother hangs above the door. Xiao Zhi carries it on in colored pencil.
It also explains why his realism matters. A wish only works if the object can be named. A vague round red shape is just a decoration. A persimmon, with its four-lobed cap, its squat sag and its skin somewhere between orange and rust, is a blessing. The accuracy isn’t showing off; it is how the message gets through.
Bloop Bloop
The fish come with a sense of humor. He calls one goldfish 大金鱼儿 — big goldfish, with the fond northern 儿 on the end — and gives another the sound effect 咕噜咕噜, bloop bloop.
The Veil Tail
A fancy goldfish’s tail is a thin, see-through veil. It has a faint color of its own and fine ribs running through it, and everything behind it shows through, including, at the folds, the fish’s own body. It has no outline. The tail simply thins until it can’t be told apart from the water.
That is hard for colored pencil, which is a line tool with a hard point. Give the tail one clean edge and the fish becomes a sticker. What works is an edge that changes as it goes — firm where the tail leaves the body, softer through the middle, and fading away at the tips, where the right move is to stop a little early and let the paper finish it. Two of his goldfish ended up mounted in white card and framed, like pictures meant to be kept.
A Betta in a Drinking Glass
One of his most demanding pictures is a betta in an ordinary square drinking glass, half full of water. The glass itself has no color, only edges made of what lies behind it, a bright stripe of highlight and a darker line where the glass is thickest.
The water adds a second problem: refraction. Seen through water, everything shifts slightly sideways and looks a little wider. At the waterline the glass seems to break, and a fin crossing that line is displaced. Draw the glass as one continuous object and it reads as a fish in a box. Break every horizontal at the waterline and the water appears without a single mark made for the water itself. The fish’s blue and gold fins, spread wide, float in the middle of it all.
Unfinished Project No. 1
Not every picture gets finished. A succulent in an iridescent glazed pot sits half done, and he named it 烂尾工程 1# — “abandoned construction project, number one,” a joke borrowed from half-built Chinese housing projects, aimed at himself.
The number is the telling part. He expects there will be a number two. Keeping the stalled pieces, and labelling them with a grin, is part of the same attitude as his motto: drawing is meant to be enjoyed, and that includes the drawings that didn’t work out.
Two Dark Roses
His pair of dark red roses shows the whole method at its fullest. The sheet is taped to a board with yellow masking tape, with a small reference photo in view. He starts at the heart of the top rose and works outward, petal by petal, keeping the tiny highlights of the water drops as bare paper. The second rose follows below it. The leaves come next, soft gray-green against the red.
Only when the flowers are complete does the background go in: black, laid around every petal edge and leaf tip until the roses seem to glow out of the dark. The tape comes off, and the finished picture goes into a white mount.
He painted another pair of roses in magenta with a teal-blue background, starting from a pink outline drawing and building the flowers from the centre out, the drops of water picked out in light and shadow.
Painting Is Simple
He likes to say painting is actually simple. The work clearly isn’t, but he means something specific: the entry is simple. Pencils, paper, a bowl of cherries from the kitchen, and a willingness to be bad at it for a while. Everything after that is just days.
Small Gifts of Good Luck
What builds up in Xiao Zhi’s work is not a portfolio in the usual sense. It is a stack of blessings — peace, plenty, a blazing year, may all your affairs go as you wish — made slowly by hand by someone who never claimed to be anything more than a person who loves to draw.
Picture the desk at the end of it all: a strip of tape peeled back, a sheet with pomegranates spilling their seeds over a cracked stone ledge, and one quiet note beside it. Eighteen days. Drawn for the pleasure of it, and given away as good luck.
See his work on Douyin: 爱画画的小智 (198606460) · pomegranates (18 days) · chili peppers · two dark roses · magenta roses. All artwork and video © 爱画画的小智, shown with credit.