I think I agree for the most part with what Simon, Kerry and Tim have said. It really doesn't matter how one created the work, just how it looks and if it evokes some reaction in the viewer. And it really only matters to those of us who create these odd looking images how "hard" or "easy" we might perceive that that artwork was to make. Like when I played in bands back in the day - A musician can miss the joy of just listening and feeling the music because he's too intent on checking out the guitarist's technique and whether he's playing the song "correctly" - as we might define "correct" in our own minds.

I think Simon had a neat point, an example being the views of artists who might be considered "fractal purists", that we might go to too many pains to "define" our artform and thence become "slaves to the genre" imprisoned by set-in-stone attitudes as to what constitutes a valid piece of "fractal" art and what can and can't be done to it before it can no longer be called a "fractal" as if it should matter whether it is or isn't something that fits that label more than it matters whether or not the piece just looks great. I think that can lead to stagnation in one's progress as an artist and you can end up just making the same images over and over. The average non-fractallist person doesn't know or really care about the esoteric "fine points" or the math involved in fractals or whether you did a bunch of layering and post-processing. And they don't care what it's called or whether it fits that definition. They just look and either they like it or they don't. The term, "post-processing" sort of bugs me - as if there is an artificial point where the creation of an image or effect has to stop before it becomes "invalid". I think we need a broad rather than narrow view of our art and not be constrained by any limits on the methods used to realize whatever vision we had in the course of the creation of a piece of art. I've never understood exactly why a fractal image needed to be "pure". We're artists, not mathematicians for the most part, no?

C-ya!

Rick