DECATUR - Krista Ward knows the color of the beast.

She mixes it up in her electronic computer cauldron and splashes it on via mouse clicks to create folks you really would not want to meet outside the pages of a comic book: take Marvel's "Thanos," aka the "Mad Titan," for example. His ghastly lavender-tone skin has been shaded into ferocious life by Ward, along with the explosive and fiery worlds he terrorizes.

For the noncomic savvy, Thanos is a Titanian Eternal with all kinds of destructive powers. He winds up killing his own mother, and the girl he wants to date is the personification of Death who, surprisingly, plays hard to get. Thanos, who looks like an animated mountain, shows some tendencies toward being better behaved and then goes bad again before, at one stage, being defeated by a character called Squirrel Girl; you just know that had to hurt the titanic ego.

Meanwhile, back in Decatur, Ward sits in her bedroom office, charged with the task of making this world of the fantastic come to vibrant life. The technical term for what this computer graphics major does is "colorist," a person who takes the black and white bones of cartoon line drawings and shades them in flesh and blood, fire and thunder, dripping fangs or laser-vision eyes.

"The comics are not drawn or written by me," explains Ward. "And the artist who drew them usually picks the colors. But what I do is apply them and work in all the shading and highlights."

Computer-assisted coloring makes infinite color variations possible, but it is highly specialized work, and many artists who draw the strips look at the exacting task the way Superman views Kryptonite. "The old guard, as we call them, may have no idea how to do it," explains Ward.

But she navigates Adobe Photoshop's software labyrinth with consummate ease and has been called on to color the adventures of everything from kid favorites such as the Transformers to major DC Comics superhero superstars Batman and Superman.

Growing up in Assumption, she could have taken or left comics as a kid and was busy nurturing dreams of "saving the whales" via marine biology. Then she discovered the talent coursing through her fingertips and decided art would be her opportunity for making a splash in this world. Ward, 33, got her big break in 1997, when she landed a job at the Heroic Age Studios in Mount Zion, pioneers in the art of computer-coloring of comic strips.

"I was one of the very lucky ones," she says, modestly. "There are so many more people out there more talented than I am who never get the chance to do challenging work that pushes you all the time."

That challenging comics universe is a rather fickle one, however. Three years ago, she tried striking out as a freelancer, but it's hard to survive on a feast-or-famine income stream when you need a steady diet of cash to pay the bills. These days, she labors as a mild-mannered marketing assistant by day for the BLDD Architects Inc. office in Decatur and leaps into the world of the fantastic in the evenings. She's also working on setting up her own design studio and is enjoying refreshing new projects like illustrating a children's book, where she actually gets to color her own drawings.

Her housemate, Maire Foxx, says Ward is like some of the characters she colors: a creative burst of energy constantly looking for an outlet. "She's so vigorous about what she does, and she can do so many things," explains Foxx, who thinks the new studio business will go well. "Artists like Krista need to be able to shine with their talent," she adds.

Not that Ward is living in a fantasy world when it comes to realizing the earthly constraints of working for clients who may have their own distinct views about what is art. She remembers, vividly, being the colorist for a rather dramatic cybernetic female who was the logo for the "2001: A Street Odyssey" theme of that year's Decatur Celebration. Ward's metallic surfacing of another artist's work was a triumph in smooth and shiny steel but, unfortunately, Celebration hierarchy had some issues with the curvaceous dimensions of the robot's hardware.

"They said her breasts were too big and her butt was out too much," laments Ward. "Everything had to shrink."

Tony Reid can be reached at treid@herald-review.com or 421-7977.