Featured Artist: William Scott, Los Angeles
 

William Scott may be young but his creations are amazingly mature. Besides being a die-hard Lady Gaga fan, William is a creative visual effects artist. His work is captivating and out of this world and sometimes mind-bending, literally.

 

WHAT KIND OF ARTIST ARE YOU?

 

“That is a question that I am trying to answer with every piece of work that I do. And with every piece of work that I do, I feel like I discover a little bit more about what I like and what I don't like and what inspires me. I guess I would like to say I'm playful in my art usually. I am exploratory.

 

I like to explore and to see what the tools can do for me. I often let the tools guide me. When you're learning, there are so many limitations that you have as far as the toolset goes. And so I think I found a way to work with the limitations and let the limitations guide me to that space that maybe I didn't think I was going to end up.”

 

WHAT WAS IT LIKE GRADUATING DURING COVID?

 

“It was a mixture of good and bad. I am by nature a socially anxious person. So there's a good side to being able to complete such an arduous task of School, especially the very last term which has a lot riding on it. There was kind of a peace to be able to finish it at home in the quiet of my own space.  But at the same time, you get so much energy and inspiration from the people around you from a day-to-day and from a school point of view - when you're in a classroom and you're surrounded by all these insanely talented artists. You just can't help but be inspired by what's going on around you and also be motivated by what's going on around you.  That was a natural motivator for almost two years. Then, for the last push of it all, to have that all drop away and be left with myself in my living room was hard.”

 

WHERE DOES YOUR INSPIRATION COME FROM?

 

“I love surrealism and I love pop art and then from a more practical standpoint I like artists on Instagram. There's just endless amounts of awesome cool innovative CG art on Instagram. And the tools, like I said, the tools have an element of inspiration in them.”

 

HOW DID YOU HEAR ABOUT GRIDMARKETS?

 

“That was all through Gnomon. It came when COVID times happened and everyone was working remotely. Of course a huge part of Gnomon is having the computers on campus and being able to work with those. All of a sudden, a bunch of students at home don't have access to those computers anymore. And so GridMarkets, I think kind of saved so many people including me and I guess even more than that now that I'm thinking about it. I actually used GridMarkets the term before COVID happened because things were just getting down to the line and the computing power I had was just not enough. So I turned to GridMarkets as an alternative.  It was introduced to me through the Gnomon teachers who were very much a proponent of it saying ‘before you do anything know this exists because this can save you’. Yeah.”

 

HOW HAS SCHOOL IMPACTED YOUR CONFIDENCE?

 

“Before I went to Gnomon, I was not confident in my work. I was not confident in my CG skills.  So I went to the school to learn a bunch and to hopefully be really confident by the time I'm done and in some ways that's true. And then in other ways you spend two years learning everything that you don't know, right? So it's a lot of just going: ‘Oh, yeah. I don't know that. I also don't know how to do that either’. And so, that which you know grows, but that which you do not know grows with it.”

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