Beautifully worded answer from a digital painter.

BobbyDash, I tip my hat off to you sir.
I will from now on explain it to people in this way whenever they suggest digital painting doesn't count as painting.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/mxpoa/i_painted_walter_white_from_breaking_bad/c34rs1j

AbstractHero wrote:

I don't understand how this is painted. Painting implies physical brushes not using your mouse to select the paint/brush tool. I saw that other people were down-voted for making the same implication but its an honest observation.

BobbyDash wrote:

You can interpret it as not being a painting, but I do. Here's how I look at it.

It's a digital painting instead of something else because I used a tool whose shape and "thickness" (represented by opacity in Photoshop) responded to how hard I pressed down just like a paintbrush does. Pencil, markers, and so on really don't have this effect and so I define a painting as the opposite of having a basically static tool. I didn't use paint and paintbrush, true, but I used something that mirrors how they handle if not how they look. I could have also used digital brushes that replicate the effect of a traditional brush much more effectively but chose not to because I wasn't trying to replicate how a traditional painting looks.

It's up to interpretation, but as far as I'm concerned I used painterly tools so it's a painting.

AbstractHero wrote:

I never knew that digital painting was like that, so good to know.

BobbyDash wrote:

Think of it this way: It's just like any digital translation you may come across. If you 'write' a paper in type, you're mostly referring to the process of formulating and organizing ideas via text, not the physical application. I noticed you point out the difference between this piece and a traditional painting where there are visual brush strokes. It's mostly a matter of style as evidenced in a few samples I gathered for you Here Here Here and Here. Those are all digital paintings but you can see where the artist can push it to look less or more traditional. Most the time, someone will refer to a digital piece as a painting as soon blending color comes into play. This Walter White is probably closer to being a sketch but you can see where his line work begins to overlap and create new shades since his strokes aren't opaque.

As far as physical application goes, most digital artists will be using a tablet like this. While this may initially still look like an emulation of pen on paper, rather than brush on canvas, there are other factors that come in to play. Those pens usually have multiple nibs or tips that you can put in that offer a completely different feel and flow to the stroke on the tablet. Some might feel grittier like a pencil some might feel silky smooth like oil paint. Some have a spring so that the nib itself squishes down very easily to emulate the feel of bristles bending over. Additionally, the software you're using, primarily PS or Painter, has a plethora of brush settings that let you customize damn near every way a brush stroke could look. A lot of time, the goal is to make a (digital) brush that looks just like a real one. Why not just stick to the real thing? Well, since it's digital just like with 'writing', you have the added benefit of Ctrl+z, saving, cutting, pasting, or editing any part of it in general.

Some people might see those benefits as a cheat that disqualifies a piece from being art or being a true painting because the artist didn't sit down and labor over a physical canvas. That's just ignorant. The added benefits of digital work may make a piece easier for one artist that turns out amazing results than a physical equivalent but another person may still slave over a painting for countless hours. Should a digital piece that took 200 hours to make not be called a painting while a traditional painting of equivalent quality not be questioned?

Here is a digital painting by Brad Rigney aka Criptcrawler, one of my favorite artists. He does a lot of MtG and D&D art. He's stated that he can easily spend 200-300 hours on a piece to get his results, often putting effort in to the point where it's hardly lucrative considering the pay on an hourly basis.

TL;DR, imo 'painting' implies the application of hue, tint, shade, and tone in blended or layered manner.

Hopefully that clarifies the situation a bit

I see beauty in the conversion of AbstractHero's perspective. The fact that one who knows the concept in a fleshed-out manner just swayed another with the winds of logic is the fireworks explosion that should ideally occur in rapid succession in various places over the web. Booyeh.

It's especially satisfying to see when this breakthrough happens with some religious people.