Zach Smith turns hashish images into immersive artwork with ‘Things To Look At While You’re High’ — Greenway Journal

Zach Smith has spent years behind the scenes serving to form how hashish manufacturers current themselves. Now, the Missouri-based artistic is stepping ahead with a venture that displays his personal perspective on the plant, releasing a 4/20 espresso desk guide titled Things to Look at While You’re High.

The guide, created beneath Altered Focus Studio, blends hashish macro images with collage-style visuals, humor, and surreal, layered compositions that invite readers to decelerate and take a better look.

Smith mentioned the idea didn’t begin out almost as bold.

“Things to Look at While You’re High’ was originally supposed to be just mainly cannabis macros, like my studio work,” Smith mentioned. “I have a large amount of cannabis images on my hard drives that aren’t licensed to anybody. No one’s using them. They’re just there being pretty.”

Initially, the thought was to assemble these photos right into a easy, visually interesting format. But when a deliberate collaborator stepped away, Smith was pressured to rethink the method. That shift pushed him into experimenting with new methods and in the end reshaped all the venture.

“I started cutting things out and making things that made me laugh,” Smith mentioned. “Then it slowly started turning into, ‘I’m going to make a landscape made out of weed only.’”

What adopted was a gradual enlargement into one thing way more advanced. The guide advanced right into a surreal visible surroundings, combining hashish imagery with surprising parts like aliens, animals, and constructed worlds that really feel equal components collage, pop artwork, and private sketchbook.

“That limitation, I think, really helps make it more individual,” Smith mentioned. “It’s like going back to grade school, cutting things out of magazines and making a collage.”

Rather than presenting a static assortment of photos, Smith approached the guide as an expertise. He mentioned he wished readers to really feel like they had been shifting via one thing interactive, not simply flipping pages.

“I knew I wanted the book to be conversational with the viewer,” Smith mentioned. “I wanted it to be something different and something that kind of talks back to you.”

That intention reveals up within the construction, which mimics a stroll via a gallery, full with visible callbacks, recurring themes, and moments that shift from humorous to unusual with out warning. The tone leans deliberately unpolished and unpredictable, reflecting each the subject material and Smith’s artistic course of.

Personal parts additionally play a job. Smith integrated photos of his personal pets all through the guide, utilizing them as characters throughout the bigger visible narrative.

“All of my seven little rugrats” seem within the venture, Smith mentioned, referring to his pets. He famous that his archive of animal pictures turned simply as helpful as his hashish images.

The venture displays Smith’s broader expertise in Missouri’s hashish trade, the place he spent a number of years working in advertising roles earlier than transitioning into full-time images.

“I’ve been doing the commercial photography thing full time for about a year and a half now, and before that, I was a marketing director for about four or five years in Missouri,” Smith mentioned. “So, yeah, about six or seven years since basically the beginning in Missouri.”

That background continues to affect his work, significantly as he seems towards extra instructional initiatives. Smith mentioned his subsequent launch, A Rookie’s Guide to Weed, is designed to deal with the confusion and hesitation he has seen from new customers coming into dispensaries.

   

“I don’t want people to be scared,” Smith mentioned. “There’s a lot of words that you don’t know when you walk into a dispensary and you can walk out scared to ask questions and with something you don’t need.”

The information will deal with simplifying hashish ideas, overlaying matters like consumption strategies, plant fundamentals, and customary misunderstandings in a format that’s accessible with out dropping character.

“It’s a collection of information that smarter people than me have either told me or I’ve read, and me just kind of giving that to people in a dumbed-down version,” Smith mentioned.

Alongside the guide, Smith can also be creating a companion journal that enables customers to trace merchandise and experiences, serving to them higher perceive what works for his or her preferences.

“It’s sort of like a weed passport almost,” Smith mentioned. “You can go back and be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve tried this.’”

As his artistic output expands, Smith mentioned he’s additionally refining how he separates his work. Future industrial images exterior of hashish will function beneath his Zachary David model, whereas Altered Focus Studio will stay targeted on hashish tradition, artistic initiatives, and direct neighborhood engagement.

“Altered Focus gets to kind of get its revamp as this fun space for me to share silly weed and psychedelic themed art and be able to share the cannabis knowledge that I’ve gotten over the years,” Smith mentioned.

That shift permits Smith to return to what initially drew him to the plant and the trade, utilizing creativity as a approach to join somewhat than simply market.

“This was supposed to just be pictures of weed,” Smith mentioned. “Now it’s something that actually feels like it means something.”

The guide, together with a themed calendar and merchandise that includes paintings from the venture, can be found via Altered Focus Studio’s website.

Smith additionally plans to convey the venture on to customers via dispensary pop-ups and neighborhood occasions.

“That was kind of what it was, man,” Smith mentioned. “And then it just kept going deeper and deeper into it.”

Buy “Things To Look At While You’re High” here.

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