Zak Smith

I realised that my favourite artist, Zak Smith, is actually very useful for my current project. I recently bought The Zak Smith book 'Pictures of Girls' as I've wanted all of Zak's books for a while now and this one was reduced Amazon. I was gushing over it when I realised how similar his work was to mine. Being my favourite artist my work is pretty much influenced by his by default, but this is usually in a stylistic sense, in my use of ink and how to balance colour and black and whiteness. For the majority of my work this project however I've not used ink and been using colour in a different way so Zak's work didn't seem to have much sway. Looking through the book however I realised I'd been an idiot for missing the strong link between my current work is, not in style but simply subject matter. Unsurprisingly 'Pictures of Girls' is filled with Smith's various portraits of girls, girls with a strong sense of style, similar to the type of people I've been drawing but a bit more alternative. The girls he paints are usually very posed also like the pictures I've been drawing. This makes Smith's work very useful in figuring out how to compose the people in my drawings and how to convey different styles of clothing. I can look at how he uses these aspects to convey a personality from his models, which is also important to my work.

One of the most interesting aspects of Zak's work is his incredibly detailed backgrounds done heavily in ink that contrast the figure. My work completely lacks this using no or only abstract backgrounds. This is mainly due to wanting the work to be about the figure but seeing how Zak uses background to compliment the figure, improving the image but not detracting attention at all leads me to think that developing a background style for at least some of my types of work could work very well.

 (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6699/1331/1600/v_in_corner_cd2.jpg)
(http://www.creativityfuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Temper-Acrylic-painting-by-Zak-Smith1.jpg)