I can coördinate my clothes, but if you hand me a box of pencil crayons (Canadian English) and ask me to put five sets of three together that all coördinate or match among themselves, well, that’s gonna be a long and taxing afternoon for me. (Now get me to make all five sets coördinate across each other.)
Yet, just as I can ID a typeface by a serif sometimes, the paint colour of a car passing by is enough to get me to turn and look even if I only glimpse it out of the corner of my eye. As an example, there is but one shade of indigo that works, and it’s found on the Golf R (and, in violation of natural law, on the “e‑”Golf).
I have a colour sense, but I can’t produce. And I say again: The New Yorker’s documentation that Jony Ive has one designer working on nothing but colour makes me wonder how the hell she keeps up. It’s a big job.
Edgar Murillo (homepage; Tumblère) is a deaf gay artiste from Spain. (Yes, he’s the one.) He seems to draw in pencil crayon. As such Edgar is freed from the handicap of the computerized colour palette, which hinders more than it helps. While Edgar uses the right tools, so could you or I; neither of us could manifest his colour sense, because when you’re functioning at this level it’s so deeply embedded that “innate” is a term that doesn’t do it justice.
The shadowy Colo[u]r Marketing Group and any number of graphic designers will do a lousy job of explaining colour (inept description is what we expect from designers), tritely minimizing colour’s effects as “emotional.” In truth the effects are primal. Edgar Murillo is working at the primal level.
I hope you like male nudes. Edgar sure does.
And, obviously, among Edgar’s many black-and-white illustrations is one that violates itself. As it must.
The publishing industry and (more profitably) the world of cinema dearly need colourists with innate skill. Imagine being deaf and gay, fluent in the national sign language (presumably), competent in the written version of Castilian Spanish (“a machine gun of syllables”), and able to write a bit of English. Now add a talent like this.