Cheating

There have been a few blog posts over on Muddy Colors in the past couple of days on the subject of "cheating" in art with the use of photography and/or digital media. 

This term "cheating" comes up frequently with digital media in regards to images that either use photo reference, photo collage, photo paint overs, or even just straight hyper realistic painting. Often people will accuse the artist of "cheating" because they may have used shortcuts to get where they ended up with the final. The truth of the matter is that when it comes to image creation and process there is no such thing as "cheating". Any means you use to get to a final image is fair game. However, since some of these processes may include the heavy use of photos it would be up to the artist personally to determine whether the use of these photos is to them "cheating". 

An example of this would be an artist who uses a combination of photo collage and paint overs. If this artist poses his own models, takes his own pictures from those models, edits those photos and collages/paints over them then that artist can feel fulfilled in that he truly created his image from start to finish without cheating. Conversely, that same artist could use images they found online or from a magazine, collage and then paint over those images and feel like they cheated to get to the final, even though they may have extensively altered or painted into/over those photos. In this case it is up to the artist whether or not they cheated by using images they found rather than images they created (not to mention addressing copyright issues with found images and whether or not it is legal to use certain images within your work).

This is where the artist needs to take a step back to see if they are cheating themselves in the creation of their art. For instance, if you think that posing your own models or sketching from life would have gotten you to a better quality final than having found reference elsewhere, then I would say that you were cheating yourself to some degree.

This is the only 'cheating' that I think really makes a difference to an artist and only in so far as they are concerned about their own process and how they got to the final image (which is what really matters).