Becoming a Chameleon
From Chris Sotomayor

Much like the letterer or even an inker, the better the colorist, the more he blends in.

The colorist’s role is a contribution, a part of a greater whole. The artwork should maintain a level of cohesion and have a certain flow about it. As much as we all want to leave our marks and stand out, we can’t do it at the risk of everyone else’s work. Fighting the inked drawing with overdone color risks pulling the reader out of the reading experience and ruining not just the pacing of the story but the story itself. So it’s important to be able to accurately judge just what a particular story or penciller needs to complement the rest of the work and the tone of the story. Some pencillers will require a lighter touch—simple coloring with a somewhat limited palette. A more graphic style can really benefit from something like that. A book like Hellboy would suffer from reader distraction if it were over-rendered, given not just the artistic style but the subject matter. But then, some pencillers thrive on allowing their color artist to help “fill in the blanks,” thus leaving many things open for interpretation. We must use our creative judgment to decide what’s best for the project. How far to go. What kind of techniques to use. Use the opportunity to problem solve, and look at what some other people are doing. There may be many different ways to accomplish one particular thing. One of the best tools in our problem-solving arsenal is to examine nature. Most of the answers can be found there, and our interpretations can lead to fresh ideas, which is really where creativity starts.

INSIDER VOICE
Neal Adams on Teaching and Learning

A person is not taught; a person learns. As a teacher I’ve had these experiences: You can go into a classroom with the assumption that you’re going to teach people something. Well, that isn’t going to happen. People can only be taught what they are willing to learn. And if they want to learn, they can suck things out of you that you might not otherwise give them. So the concept of teaching is almost a ridiculous concept. The concept of learning is the important concept. You can’t teach people who don’t want to learn. But you can easily teach people who want to learn by just making the information available.