well, you could look at that from another perspective poser allows you to create as much or as little of the final painting from the ground up as you want. you could model the model, props, texture them, light them, pose them, paint over them, etc. but again some people have difficulty with certain aspects of the image, and they can use pregenerated ones. i discourage using COMPLETELY pregenerated stuff - like poses, and props, and lights, and texes, and models, etc.... but people who do that will eventually move on to creating more and more of the final work. at what point a 'renderer' becomes an 'artist' i dont know, nor is it my place to judge. but as cryptopooka said, how many painters do you know that have created their subject - their model - from the ground up? i doubt there are any. so why is it so different to pose a virtual model and light it? why does it automatically 'disqualify' you from being a 'real artist'? pfft..