Paper Tiger's Boris Vallejo books
   Dreams - The Art Of Boris Vallejo
   The Boris Vallejo Portfolio
                                                                  (Paper Tiger)

Dreams - The Art Of Boris Vallejo (1999)(also Thunder's Mouth Press) A very handsome 128-page collection of the artist's work from fashion ads, movie posters, book covers, game illustrations and even biblical scenes. They are grouped into chapters called: Aliendroids, Mythology, Mythical Beasts, Battlefields, Women Of Wonder, Alien Worlds, Primeval Chaos, The Deep and Modern Tales. In addition to his ubiquitous barbarian male & female nudes, there is also to be found aliens, robots, spaceships & futuristic cities, as well as wizards & sorceresses, castles, knights, dinosaurs, dragons, centaurs and mermaids. Other than the one page introduction, the rest of the not-insignificant text is commentary and anecdotes accompanying each artwork's title caption (along with origination year). 112 pages are held to display single art pieces. These include 17 pieces that cross the book's gutter, most of which are handled very well, but disconcertingly, while this allowed many to display as a larger piece, this was employed on several that were simply placed that way unnecessarily and not expanded beyond what a single page could have held. Anyway, despite those few, the art presentation here scores this book as the best solo collection of Vallejo's work on The List. With that said, I idiosyncratically scored higher the presentation of TWIN VISIONS and IMAGINISTIX, books that display the works of Boris along with those of his wife, Julie Bell, but in an amazing testament to the man's output, none of the paintings here repeat any of those found in the two other volumes.

The Boris Vallejo Portfolio (1994)(also Dragon's World) This is an easy-to-handle 12"x 9" book, albeit slim, with 64 pages to display 28 paintings. They're presented as isolated full-page plates, on the back of which (the facing page of the next art piece) is a much smaller black-and-white photo of the same image with the title caption. The 4 pages of text are an introduction to the artist. The images include a nude or two (of both genders) among the spaceships, robots, knights, wizards, sorceresses, monsters, centaurs, dragons, Conan and other barbarians. Before getting this book, The List recommends Boris' monographs, DREAMS, FANTASTIC ART OF [...], FANTASY ART TECHNIQUES & MIRAGE as well as all of the books he put out with the art of both he and his wife, Julie Bell. If you have already gotten all of those, know that here you will find one work that finally gets the full-page treatment that it didn't receive it in any of those books and another five paintings not seen among them at all (that's less than a fourth of the delivered works here). There is also a substantially larger-size edition available that scores much lower due to being more ungainly.