A Distant Soil Whitewashed
on March 18th, 2009Below, a try out page by an artist who hoped to do the colors on the A Distant Soil graphic novels for one of my now-defunct publishers. There were two color volumes of ADS published there before their trade line went belly up. They are long out of print.
I actually like the subtle tones and understated color of this sample better than the colorists we ultimately settled on. I thought the printed product rather garish. That includes my own work on the books. Bleh. Nothing against the people we hired, but I do believe my tastes have changed, and the printing standards were not up to snuff.
But a closer at this page look will reveal another problem:
For some reason, this person could not seem to get the hang of coloring ethnic skin tones. Everyone was colored white. Brent, D’mer, and Bast are all white in this piece and in every other color sample. Redheads became blondes.
In the end, the woman didn’t get the job. I have never seen her coloring credit on any other book, so I don’t know if she ever pursued art as a profession at a later time.
I don’t know if this was a technical problem for her – working with darker colors – but I thought it was interesting.
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Had she just not done her homework about who had what hair color or what ethnicity was which?
Alas, she had not only thoroughly read the entire series and had all the books, she worked as editor on it at one point. Which makes it doubly odd.
That really is weird. If she had that much background with the material, failure to do the full range of skin coloration seems intentional.
How sad.
Hmn, another white-washed Avatar, eh? Maybe this woman works for Paramount in their casting department and has something to do with the main characters for the Last Airbender movie being white. Stranger things have happened.
Thanks to M. who recognized the story and tracked down info.
The colorist did not appear to pursue a career in art and entertainment.
So, no worries over The Last Airbender.
Image gone??
Fixed! Thanks for that, didn’t realize the image had been deleted in the blog migration.