The only thing I would add to my commentary above is that IMHO a true artist goes beyond the simple medium. A white canvas on a board could be labled "Polar bear in a blizard" without even a fingerprint on the material. Take Poser, load a model, load a clothing item, and call it "Polar bear in a blizard". pose that model with a ready made pose and you're moving towards something that comes not from the folks who give it to you, but something from your mind. Move the pose to match the image in your mind and you're a step farther. Load a texture and you have something pretty. Make your own texture in uvmapper/PS and you have some sweat and tears and effort incorporated in the image. Work hard at the 3d and the PS and you have something no one else can do. Snap it together and its a start, a good start, but surely with effort there's room for personal growth. Its like the difference between art and construction. Buy a plastic model at the hobby store and snap it together and you have a corvette with all the curves just right. Find a piece of driftwood and whittle it to the image in your mind and you have something that 10,000 other consumers couldn't buy at the mall. Poser and PS are just that, art or construction. Construction comes from the press of a button and technical knowledge. Art comes from the heart, mind and soul. The constructionist looks at Poser/PS as a tool to build a scene. The artist looks at Poser/PS as a tool to express what can't be said in words. The resultant images are nothing alike. Oddly enough though, I think there's more to this debate than just art/construction. Art uses one side of the brain. Science uses the other. Not many people can think with precision with both halves. (gee, if I use this node and select that parameter combination, will the result be what I want to convey?) That makes the CG art community a very unique group of people. Some lean towards art, others towards science, but all of you can do both. If you lean towards science, make the best technical image you can and use your art side to pretty it up. If you lean towards art, get the basic shapes in there with what you know and brush in PS to convey our mind's eye. Both types of people have awesome images in the galleries here and they inspire me to grow.