Tools are tools

I have the latest issue of Artist magazine which says that digital art will overtake traditional art, but having worked a bit in both - I wonder. If you are at the pinnacle of digital art, leveraging tools like Photoshop to alter your images, then the amount of care and time that you take to create an image are similar to creating an image in traditional media.

Many people using Photoshop will sample, some will create wholesale. Care will be given to color saturation, depth, contrast, composition, color balance, edges, and line. None of this differs at all from traditional media. At some point the amount of time and effort starts to balance out. The artisan chooses the tools with the most control and flexibility. A skilled traditional artist has physical media and spends time studying and creating or capturing an image to evoke some type of feeling or meaning. There are plenty of digital artists that create images from scratch as well. Traditional artists borrow images and styles from prior artists or images - I just don't get any meaningful difference.

For me, the lines between photoshop and oil or pastel are blurred. I do painting from life, as well as photograph - preferably both. I almost always refer back to a photo if I have one - particularly for details. I alter the photo to depict what I had in my minds eye when I dreamed of creating the image. I photograph the painting in progress and alter it in photoshop to see if the image can be enhanced and then I go back to the painting to effect those changes that seem appropriate. I can use photoshop to dream up a different background for a subject, I can change the color scheme to give a painting depth, I can blur an image to lose edges - I love this tool to help me to visualize. When I photograph a subject to complement my painting, I alter in photoshop to do high color, dark versions, desaturated versions for values, lighter versions to find lines/proportion.

I don't agree with the strict demarcation between traditional and new media - tools are tools.