( Originally posted on my Deviant Art Journal )

Observations I posted to twitter and will extrapolate on here, after thinking through the reasons why I’ve lost the last two Battle Artist Color Battles, and the other couple of coloring competitions I’ve participated in.

In my coloring attempts, I’ve tried to go with an approach other people weren’t using, the same color choices, etc. There’s a community out there amongst professionals that really frowns on making your coloring attempt look the same as the attempt of the original colorist. Finger pointing happens. Being told you only copied someone else’s genius.

The thing is … that when you look at a piece of lineart of, say, Superman in the sky. You expect that drawing to look a certain way in color. That mental image isn’t just in your brain, but is also in the mind of everyone else who ever looks at the lines. And while there may be differences between rendering, subtle changes in the color choices, or the lighting direction… in the end, that drawing is expected to come out in color a certain way. 50 colorists could take that drawing, and you’d probably end up with 45 very similar images and 5 that were unique.

It’s not that those 5 are wrong. It’s that people expected the rendition that those 45 other people did.

And that’s why I fail. It has nothing to do with my technical skill set. Anyone can take a look at my piece by itself and pull it apart or laud its merits. But I fail, because I don’t want to give you the image that you were expecting.

I have a group of friends who usually watches me color things for competitions and stuff. This group of friends and supporters is constantly pushing me to get outside my comfort zone, approach the inks in front of me from a new direction, in a new way with a different atmosphere than I would normally have thought of. It’s because of them that we end up with a red night scene on Buffy and a gigantic energy explosion on Hulk Asunder. Those guys are always pushing me to be standout, to be new and different and unique.

It makes me a loser in several ways, but a winner, too.

Competitions aren’t about skill. They are, to a certain extent, but they aren’t. Competitions are about providing the judges with what they were looking for from the beginning. Judges are people, too. They have a vision in their mind like everyone else does, of how something in black and white is supposed to look. The job of those trying to ‘win’ is to provide them with this. The object, in that line of thinking, is to do what the other 45 people did, but better. With your own spin on it, but within the limits, too.

In a lot of ways, the professional comic book world is like that. And that’s why I lose, and I realise now that this is probably also why I only have a small handful of fans and why Marvel and DC aren’t banging on my door yet. Because the thing is, that standing out is great, and being unique is great, but if it doesn’t sell comics - If it doesn’t provide people with the image they were looking for in the beginning - then you aren’t going to be hired. Editors, like competition judges, have certain expectations.

I think there are chances and places where standing out and being unique are probably going to sell comics. I want to believe that with every fiber in my being. I need to, because I believe that colorists should always be trying to find new and unique ways of doing things. If we all colored Superman or the X-men the same way, then there wouldn’t be a need for more than a small handful of us. I refuse to accept that.

However, I am a practical woman. I understand you have to pick and choose your battles. I understand the meaning of ‘time and place’. Someone recently told me that I needed to try going more mainstream or looking at what sells and copying that. I understand more what they meant, now.

I don’t know if I can do it. It grates on me and goes against everything I believe in. But that is the real world of making art for money. It’s something I think we all face. The pros have managed it somehow, and I’ll just have to figure it out, too.