(++++) VISITS TERRESTRIAL & EXTRATERRESTRIAL

Color Universe: A World of Coloring Challenges. By Kerby Rosanes. Plume. $17.

     Kerby Rosanes has a way of transporting viewers of his tremendously detailed black-and-white drawings to realms that have never existed, ones that might possibly exist, and ones that definitely exist but have never looked quite the way he portrays them. All those journeys are wrapped up in Color Universe, which contains material originally published in Alien Worlds, Fragile World, Mythic World, and Worlds within Worlds. Rosanes’ art is immediately recognizable for its extreme detail and his preoccupation with certain types of unusual designs and perspectives – notably, creatures of the natural world (not necessarily our natural world) whose backs carry additional natural elements, or evidence of civilization; or strange beings that morph into apparent landscape features. A number of those odd and expressive illustrations appear in Color Universe, such as a giant turtle-shelled being with amazingly anthropomorphic, expressive facial features, a head atop which is a wading pool for birds, and a back upon which are both natural elements and created ones. Another example is a stegosaurus-like creature whose back sports buildings and power lines rather than triangular scales.

     Mythic elements also abound in Rosanes’ art, sometimes drawn from actual myths: one impressive page here shows the three Fates, Clotho the Spinner of life’s thread, Lachesis the Allotter of lifespan, and Atropos the Inflexible determiner of death – surrounded respectively by elaborate timepieces, abundantly flowering vegetation, and a pile of skulls. At other times, Rosanes creates scenes that are overtly otherworldly but that look as if they portray yet-undiscovered mythic tales: a giant, looming spiderlike being standing or floating in front of a spacesuited person shown as comparatively minuscule; a sort of outer-space Pandora’s box from which gears and other manufactured implements emerge along with bizarre skulls and skeletons, with a planetary scene in the background; and others.

     Despite the undoubted attractiveness of Rosanes’ more-unusual creations, many of his most-impressive illustrations are extremely detailed renditions of ordinary Earth creatures – which become extraordinary when shown with this level of detail. Color Universe includes a number of these: pigeons perched on a tree branch; a pack of four wild dogs, apparently on the hunt; a bat hanging upside-down from a branch while consuming the fruit growing there; an extreme close-up view of a mandrill’s face; and more. As befits a coloring book for adults, all the pages are in black-and-white, and it is up to every would-be colorist to decide to what extent the portrayals – which are already impressive without being colored – should use realistic or thoroughly unrealistic palettes in order to enhance or alter Rosanes’ originals.

     The potential of varying approaches to color is clearly shown in the 16-page section that opens this book, in which some individuals’ approaches to various illustrations are shown and discussed by Rosanes from an artistic standpoint. Rosanes analyzes each colorist’s use of specific hues in expected or unexpected ways, explains the way light and shadow are emphasized or de-emphasized, and suggests how the use of color can create a sense of harmony or build on the outré nature of a scene. These colored pages will not be to the taste of other artists, of course, but all the illustrations appear later in the book in their original black-and-white form, which can be interpreted or reinterpreted as each individual wishes. The intricacy and care of all Rosanes’ work is everywhere apparent in this compilation volume, and as always in his books, the pages are sufficiently impressive in their original form so that it is not necessary to color them at all in order to enjoy what he has created. In fact, it would be interesting sometime to see some samples of pages in which only dollops of color are added to Rosanes’ original art – a touch of accentuation here and there to bring out the underlying fascination of the black-and-white originals. Whether brightly colored or seen in their unmodified form, Rosanes’ scenes create an impressive sense of visiting worlds that cannot be as well as the one we already have but may never have looked at with this level of attention to detail.