From the History of WFL: The Stigma of Digital Art

Many people have an intense disdain for digital art. Those whom I have talked to think digital artists let the computer do the work for them - just type a few keys, punch a few numbers, click randomly, and BOOM! Fake Warhol.

If it were only that easy. Sure, people can take a photograph, open it in Photoshop (or The GIMP), run a few filters, and it looks like a piece of crap (relatively speaking). It looks like what people perceive as digital art, in many cases.

Some older art fans even think that fractals printed on a dot matrix printer is what digital art is today - which is asinine.

The computer is a tool, and we can paint using one in a similar fashion to "real" painters. We have our graphics tablets. We have our brushes, which we can design. We can even emulate real painting using software such as ArtRage (they have a free version if you'd like to try it).

We can reach details not even open to consideration from regular painters without huge amounts of time. We don't have overhead of paints and canvas. We have a greater array of colors available to us. We can even attain superior photo realism, should we desire it.

Digital art is a beautiful, open medium. Don't criticize what you don't understand.

-WFL