A computer is a tool and the means by which one can make a work of art. But you need an artist to use it.
A camera does not make a portrait. It's the skill and knowledge of the artist's eye of the photographer that composes, adjusts, captures light and color to his preference.
A typewriter does not write a novel for you; neither does a word processor. It may offer new tools of memory as well as fonts and page layout and organization, but it's still a tool for the artist.
As a computer artist, I can tell you that even the simplest landscape done in a 3D program requires knowledge of light and shadow, camera optics, and composition. We don't draw our materials in the traditional sense, but we do choose and calculate the color, specularity, transparency, paint our own bump patterns, create our own photo textures or adjust others, study rock formations, the optics of glass and crystal, the effects of gravity on soft objects like hair and cloth, and understand how to control the color and pattern in everything we use in a scene. All this within a machine that has limitations of speed, working memory, and storage capacity. And no matter how well versed we are in technology, sometimes the stupid machine is just plain temperamental.
In postwork, we have to see in our mind the perfect image, and find the imperfections the computer program produced. Once they're identified, we use virtual brushes that are just as varied as real ones, match color and grain, and practice the photographer's art of adjusting color, contrast, brightness, exposure, lens correction as well as choosing filters, adjusting sharpness, producing blur, cropping, and printing. The program doesn't do that for you. You have to have the artistic knowledge and skill first. The final image does not make itself. There is no "Make Art" button.
We paint, we sculpt, we arrange, we light, we create, even if it's sometimes with base models or props that are purchased. So we are artists.
In my case, I don't have the ability to transfer a mental vision to paper or a flat surface. But I can see it in my mind's eye and use the computer the way a photographer uses a camera.
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