Originally posted at https://canvasrebel.com/meet-h-gorlitz-scott/ by CanvasRebel on February 27, 2025:
Meet H. Gorlitz Scott
Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to H. Gorlitz Scott. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
H. Gorlitz, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
Ultimately, I’d have to say that my novel series, Sivoa, is the most meaningful of all of my projects. I mean, I’ve been doing artwork, worldbuilding, and comics for it ever since I was in middle school, when my friends and I decided to make Mortal Kombat 3. That obviously didn’t work out, so I shelved it for most of high school. In my senior year I decided to take the characters that we made and drew a comic for my friends to read. In college, thanks to the never ending stream of questions from my friend Sarah, about the characters in my sketchbooks, I decided to take the comic thing more seriously and began self-publishing comics issues. I did this for twelve years before realizing that I’d never complete telling the story in that format, in my lifetime. By way of a letter on the inside cover of the last comic issue I published, I announced that I’d be changing formats and diving headlong into the craft of fantasy novels. This was well received and after a few years of doing everything “wrong,” I teamed up with my wonderful editor, Patti Geesey, and wrote the first of three Sivoa novels. I guess we figured something out because Sivoa: Sunrise won Best Fantasy Novel in the 2019 Indie Original Awards. Since then we’ve successfully written and published book 2.
H. Gorlitz, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’ve made artwork my whole life, but I got into storytelling by making these weird alien comics, called Zork and Zeep, for my baby brother. The need to tell stories with visual art persisted all the way into college, where there was no curriculum for it. The closest I got was a broad graphic design degree – which did give me the tools and skillset needed to self-publish comics, but it didn’t really open many doors into the comic industry. Instead I began doing freelance graphic design in addition to working a retail job.
I managed to carve out a little bit of a niche for myself in that I could come up with cartoony mascots and comics for my clients. Superheroes and anime were really popular at the time and since I could do both, I frequently came up with weird little characters that companies could market. This momentum sort of fell off when my husband and I had a daughter in 2010. After struggling to find and keep work (while also taking care of a tiny child), I decided to focus more on my own artwork and projects. It’s not easy, but my creations are my primary income now.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
As I mentioned before, I went to school to be a graphic artist. As such, my primary art medium was digital. In 2022 a terrible software by the name of Midjourney illegally incorporated images into it’s training database and began generating “AI art” at no cost or effort of the people playing with it. Suddenly there was a deluge of digital artwork everywhere and people either didn’t care that it wasn’t human-made or they assumed that all digital artwork was AI generated. Since I had been dabbling in watercolor shortly before then, I spent the next couple of years switching to that as my primary means of making art. Now people understand that I actually put the work into my creations and respect/buy them again.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Currently, I think that the best way that society can help artists is to actually care if the images they see on their screens are human-made or not. The utter ambivalence people have to imagery produced by generative AI is hurting artists across all industries. Corporations are letting go of their artists, illustrators, graphics designers, writers, etc. all so that they can replace them with a prompt generator. If you want original ideas and “fresh” media to consume, call out AI uses and don’t give money to the distributors of such.