Yu Xiaofu appears to have been born to draw. When he was only two or three years old he would cover the house and the yard with chalk drawings, and when he was older his parents sent him to a private art studio on Gao-An Road to learn how to draw. Yu Xiaofu later entered the Shanghai Theater Academy and began his painting career. Yu Xiaofu favors fusing dark brown into deep red backgrounds then adding orange and yellows to the bright areas. This color arrangement gives people a powerful visual impact that strikes with almost metallic force. Unlike other painters of characters, Yu Xiaofu can dispense with models and reference pictures, instead painting on the canvas whatever he envisions, just as Chinese art theory suggests for the truly gifted. His ability to visualize his subject matter and transfer it to the canvas demonstrates his outstanding composition ability, creativity and sketching technique. Yu Xiaofu once said:"My works are generally from memory or derived through thought. The German author T. Storm of set-piece novels once said that he prefers to be curled up on the sofa and completely lost in the cleverness of his own techniques, which seems an apt way to describe Yu Xiaofu"