Frank Frazetta: Rough Work
(2007 - Spectrum)

(edited by Arnie & Cathy Fenner) I quite like this book. The ROUGH WORK of the title refers to aspect that almost none of this collection is 'finished' art. Most are preliminaries - a middle step if you will, between idea and completed execution. Added to that are a number of sketches and personal pieces. What I'm impressed with is the decision to produce this as a smaller book (9.25 x 6.25 inches). The larger size, that seems to have become the accepted artbook standard, would mean that many of these pieces would be blown-up more than would be attractive. A nice sketch all of a sudden seems to be wasting too much paper. I think some of the presentations in FRAZETTA SKETCHBOOK suffered from that. Anyway, there are 128 pages here of which 89 are have dominant large reproductions of these works and another seven have several crowded together. That does leave four pages of text commentary and 23 that have sideways images or really really indistinct thumbnail and sketchwork. The four double-page spreads are not ideal, but I guess three of them are "o.k.". The subjects are many and varied - aliens & fairies, african & asian warriors, knights & vikings, indians & savages, cannibals & vampires, horses & dinosaurs, sharks, apes, bears and sabretooths. Nudity in no small measure. The captioning is erratic, with only occasional identifying notes accompanying a work (not all of which are accurate. . .). This site recommends other Frazetta books before this one - namely, FANTASTIC PAINTINGS OF FRAZETTA, the three Underwood retrospectives, FANTASTIC WORLDS, the PILLOW BOOK and the FRAZETTA SKETCHBOOKs, but there are still 62 'well-presented' images here (mostly sketches & preliminaries) that you will not see in any of those and seven more that did get featured reproductions in them, but get a even better presentation here. Obviously, well worth getting if you particularly like Frazetta's work.