Interesting vibe I get when I try to explain to the uninitiated on what a digital portrait is or even how to go about making digital paintings in general. Some people get this hopeless look of "I don't understand, magic" others (some artists sadly) see it as some sort of slight of hand, like its a trick of some sort. Some traditional artists unfortunately miss the fact that a graphics tablet / PC are simply tools, they can grasp pencil-paper, paint-canvas, however if it creates images without the above combinations and it's not a camera, the mind goes slightly ape-shit. One artist was even audacious enough to ask if what I do was real.

How does one define real? If its something you can hold in your hand and touch, well when I print these suckers and frame them I guess that'll make em pretty real. That's not the real issue though, it seems that if a pencil or a brush (or chisel or wood for that matter)isn't involved, that it somehow lacks effort. Skilled digital artists make this stuff look easy and produce some incredible images, so do skilled draftsmen (pencilers if you will), skilled inkers, all the big names in art history painted, some phenomenally well. Painting on the computer is simply another vehicle for an artist to express the stuff that's in their head, its not photo manipulation (though that is a skill unto itself as well), most of the time this stuff is created from scratch. It takes the same amount of creative energy to create a digital image as it does to create a "traditional" one.