Digital Paintings

A long time ago, when digital cameras had a small amount of megapixels, I found that I wanted to enlarge some of my photos. Enlarging a photo in Photoshop would create an image that was blurry or bring out digital imperfections. One way to get around this was to push the pixels into a painting, using a Wacom digital tablet. The process is very much like painting on a wet photo. I use either Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter to turn these photos into paintings. I hand-paint each stroke, deciding what stays or gets covered. Sometimes, I just want to obscure the background to emphasize the subject. Other times, hand painting is a great technique to blend a composite together.

I’ve found that some people don’t know how to categorize this art. Is it a photograph? Is it a painting? Is it something in between? Does this seem like cheating or is this just another tool to make art? What do you think?