Kurt Michael Russell
Award-winning comic book colorist and educator whose credits span Vault, Image, DC, and Mad Cave, including Crush Depth, The Blue Flame, and Money Shot.
Kurt Michael Russell is a comic book colorist whose career has spanned the biggest names in the industry—and whose teaching has helped a new generation of artists find their way in color. Based in Long Beach, Mississippi, Russell has been coloring professionally since 2011, amassing credits on more than a hundred books for publishers like DC, Image Comics, Vault Comics, Dynamite, Top Cow, IDW, Oni, and Mad Cave Studios.
His palette has shaped some of indie comics’ most distinctive titles, including The Blue Flame and Money Shot for Vault, as well as Glitterbomb and Hack/Slash. He even colored a Batman story for DC’s Love Is a Battlefield anthology—which, as he puts it, counts. In 2021, his peers honored his work with the Nerdie Award for Colorist of the Year. On Crush Depth, Russell drenches every panel in the cold blues and blacks of the deep sea, letting flashes of alien color puncture the darkness.
Russell is also the creator of the Color With Kurt YouTube channel, which he founded to make color theory and digital techniques accessible to artists at every level. Through his site comiccolor.com and his courses, he continues to teach the craft he loves.
For fans of lush, atmospheric coloring, horror comics with real visual texture, and the artists who make indie books glow, Kurt Michael Russell is a colorist worth following.
