Artist Zhenxin Colored Pencil / 真心教彩铅 (64207333190): Playful Colored Pencil Tutorials and Free Beginner Classes
A faint pencil line on a white sheet: six petals, drawn so lightly they barely show. A pink pencil goes over them, then a deeper red along the center of each petal, then a darker crimson in the throat of the flower. A few red speckles, a few long stamens tipped with brown, a green stem pulled down from the base. A lily opens on the paper in about a minute — and the lesson is that anyone can follow it.
The Artist
真心教彩铅 — Zhenxin, roughly “sincerely teaching colored pencil” — is a colored-pencil teacher based in Hunan. The first word is the one that matters. 真心 means wholehearted, meant from the heart.
Her own description is two short lines. The first is a belief: 遇事不往心里搁，画画疗愈人心 — don’t hold things inside; painting heals the heart. The second is an offer: free livestream classes for adults who join her group, teaching adults to draw. Everything she makes comes back to those two lines.
Classes That Cost Nothing
She calls her live classes 公益 — public welfare, given freely rather than sold. And she has a particular student in mind: the adult beginner, the person who decided long ago that drawing was something you either learned at school or never did, and who now feels a little awkward starting.
That student doesn’t need a masterclass. They need permission, a subject small enough to finish in one sitting, and someone cheerful to follow. Much of what Zhenxin draws makes sense once you picture that person: a lily, a slice of lime, a hamster, a cat, a jelly, a plum, a slice of pumpkin, a mooncake for Mid-Autumn. Nothing sad and nothing grand. Things that are good company for an hour.
A Slice of Lime
The lime lesson starts with the finished slice shown first, then a pencil circle. A ring of dark green goes round the rim for the peel, then a paler band for the pith, then the segments: pale green-yellow wedges, each outlined faintly and left lighter at the center so they look full of juice. A white pencil goes over the flesh at the end, softening it, and a few bright spots are left where the light catches the wet surface.
Glass Made Simple
One of her lessons promises that glass in colored pencil is 竟然如此简单 — surprisingly simple. The subject is a perfume bottle filled with golden liquid. It starts as a few ruled rectangles: the bottle, the stopper, the label. The outline goes over in orange. Then come the highlights, planned before any color goes down — narrow strips along the edges of the glass that will stay white. The golden liquid is laid in with yellow and orange, deepened toward the edges with a warm red-brown, and the thick glass base is drawn as a paler, gray-tinted band. The label is left white, and the lettering goes in last in black.
What makes it work is exactly what a beginner would skip: leaving the white of the paper alone. Glass in a drawing is mostly the places where the pencil didn’t go.
Food That Makes You Hungry
Food is the heart of her teaching, and food drawing has nowhere to hide. Everyone knows what a good pan-fried bun looks like, so it either makes you hungry or it doesn’t. Accuracy isn’t enough. The picture has to signal warmth and moisture: a sheen that gathers in the low places of the surface, and a soft rather than crisp highlight, as if steam has just come off it.
She has drawn spicy crayfish for summer, a passionfruit split open, wobbling crystal jellies, a frozen red apple encased in ice, and a paw-shaped popsicle from Zootopia. Each one teaches the same thing: how to tell the eye what a surface would feel like in the mouth.
A Bowl Made of Watermelon
The watermelon lesson builds a whole dessert. A pencil sketch of a half-melon shell filled with cubes. The cubes are colored first, in layers of red and pink, with the cut faces lighter and the sides darker, and a few black seeds. Then the rind: a band of pale green-white inside, then the dark green stripes of the skin outside, curved to follow the bowl. Last, a little white pencil on the edges of the cubes, so they look wet and freshly cut.
Drawing a Cloud
One of her lessons takes on the sky. 画云还不简单 — drawing clouds isn’t hard, she says — and then draws a bright blue sky over the sea, with white clouds piled up above a strip of land. A cloud is the opposite of what colored pencil is good at. It has no color of its own, no hard edge and almost no dark; even its shadowed underside is paler than most things on a page. It lives in a narrow band of very light values, exactly where a pencil mark shows most.
So the cloud isn’t drawn. The sky is drawn around it, in light, even passes of blue, and the cloud is what’s left: white paper with a little gray-blue added underneath for its shadow. A soft edge in colored pencil is never made in one go. It’s built from many faint passes, in different directions, until the change from cloud to sky reads as air.
Three Mistakes
One of her lessons isn’t about making something beautiful at all. It covers the three hatching mistakes beginners most often make in colored pencil. A tutorial tells you what to do. A list of mistakes tells you what is already going wrong in the drawing in front of you. A beginner who can name a mistake has stopped being stuck.
The Little Easel
Finished drawings go up on a small wooden tabletop easel, with colored pencils lined up beside them. It says something quietly to the student she has in mind: there’s no studio here, no special equipment. A small easel on a table and an ordinary set of pencils is all this takes — a normal thing for a grown-up to have in the corner of a room.
A Forgiving Medium
Why colored pencil, for people who are anxious about drawing? The answer is in how the pencil works. A colored-pencil drawing is a long chain of very small, low-risk decisions. One light pass, then another. No single stroke can ruin the picture. If a tone goes wrong, the next faint layer can pull it back. For someone out of practice, or sure they are no good at this, that is a gentle way to spend an hour. The slow pace that puts some people off is exactly what makes it safe.
A Blue Lily
She drew the lily twice. The first is pink and red, the color anyone would expect. The second is blue — 换个色彩，危险又迷人, she wrote: change the color and it becomes dangerous and alluring. The method is the same: a pale outline, the petals laid in with light blue, then deeper blue and violet toward the center, then a touch of pink in the throat, the stamens, and a green stem. Blue is a stubborn color in a pencil set; many blues go down weak and chalky. Here it goes deep and stays clean.
Sincerely
Zhenxin hasn’t invented a new technique, and doesn’t claim to. What she offers is a tone and a promise: small, finishable subjects, taught warmly and for free, to adults who thought it was too late. Her belief that drawing heals is not a slogan stuck on top of the lessons. It is the reason the lessons are built the way they are — short, kind, and impossible to fail badly.
Picture the end of a class: a lily on a white sheet, pink in one drawing and blue in the next, and someone who hasn’t drawn since school looking at what they just made.
See her work on Douyin: 真心教彩铅 (64207333190) · pink lily · perfume bottle · watermelon bowl · blue lily. All artwork and video © 真心教彩铅, shown with credit.