Mr. Totem (TATS Cru, 3A, TGE, BurnUnit) and his color schemes take you on a tour of a world you never knew existed.

Colors… Well, look at it this way: I’m from Atlanta. From the very beginning of my career, we haven’t had the same things that the bigger cities have had – like interesting paint colors. We had old paint, yeah, but it was very rare, so the majority of my work was done with the classics: Rustoleum and Krylon.

Initially, I was a simple letter aficionado, with characters. It was like that in 1990 – Twist was doing his little characters in black and white and that was what we thought was fun then. So mainly it was black and white, red and white, etc. Also, I had to watch out which colors I painted with in my neighborhood for gang reasons.
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As he pushed the envelope with his letters, Jurne YME TGE realized that his thoughts on color were evolving, too.

I’ve never considered myself a “color scheme” guy. I’m actually red-green colorblind, which means that colors might look right to me, but I don’t know how they appear to other people. I’m sure that affects my color usage, but it’s difficult to know exactly how.

In recent years, my thinking about color use has changed a lot. A few years ago I probably would have told you that color choices weren’t important as long as the letter styles were on point. It’s odd to realize now that I once made a distinction between colors and letters, and thought of color as a separate aspect of graffiti, and not really a part of the “style” department.
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