That depends on your point of view.
So what the heck am I talking about? Well the question and the answer could apply to a couple of things, probably more, such as music or visual art. For now, I’m talking about digital visual art. Mind you, the question isn’t if a picture created in the computer is an original piece of art or even art at all. I have no question that a picture created in a computer is art. I’ve seen some stunning pictures that were created digitally. It takes talent to render that regardless of the medium. Pixels, paint, chalk, or pencil, if you can use it to render a picture, it’s art.
I’m more specifically discussing the technique of using a photo of something as a guide and reference. Not like if you were drawing or painting from the photo. Instead you take the photo and scan it or just import it into your drawing program of choice as the background layer. On subsequent layers you trace the outline of the main subject(s) and on others you fill in colors sometimes using the photo as color source as well.
Kind of makes it sound a little like paint by numbers doesn’t it. It’s not that easy. There is much more skill and talent involved. Starting with the tracing of the outlines. Unless you converted the photo to line art first, there aren’t always well defined outlines. There are edges of objects and you have to pick them out just right. And it’s not the same using a mouse or stylus to trace as it is with a pencil and tracing paper. With pencil and paper tracing you see your hand, the tip of the pencil and whatever you are tracing all in the same frame. That’s not what happens when using the computer. You may have your cursor right on top of where you want to draw but your stylus may not be close enough to the tablet for it to register. Sort of like drawing a line in the air. The trick is to get the stylus on the tablet right where you want it. But you can’t see your hand in relation to the picture so you can’t tell if you’re at the right angle to stay on the line or edge you are tracing. While drawing with a mouse can help with the lines in the air problem, it tends to be more cumbersome and less comfortable. Not that using a stylus on a computer doesn’t take some getting used to. It definitely does. If you’ve never tried it and want an idea of what it can be like, try drawing with a mirror. Sit in front of a mirror with pencil and paper. Draw something on the paper by only looking at your reflection in the mirror, don’t look at the paper directly.
Now that your brain has seized up and popped a cog, it’s easy to see that there is skill and talent needed just to get the outline done. We haven’t even discussed filling things in, applying color, creating the illusion of texture, filling in shadows and blending to create the illusion of 3D and mass. Knowing what colors to use, which point and how much pressure to apply for how long, and what direction or shape the stroke should be, all that comes from skill, talent, and experience. And there’s also the composition to consider. Are you drawing a photo in its entirety or are you leaving bits out because it makes for better design and composition?
With all that goes into creating that picture digitally even when starting from a photo tracing, it’s hard to deny it being art. As to its originality, that may be the most subjective part of the question. There are a couple of situations where I think it’s correct to call the art original without hesitation. Those are when the artist using the photo, actually took the reference photo themselves. The other is when some one else took the photo for the project being worked on and with the understanding that that is how the photo is being used. I think the grey area is when the reference photo is some random picture out of a magazine, book, or such that some one else took the picture to be its own piece of art. However, I think the courts may already have addressed this. I believe they determined that something like that would be deemed a derivation of the first art and as such it is perfectly acceptable as an original piece of art as a derivation and it stands on its own.
That just leaves the purists who think it’s only art if it came from rendering a live model or scene, or straight from your imagination. No photo references allowed. They probably don’t consider anything created on the computer to be art anyway. There’s no winning an argument with them. Just sit them in front of your computer, hand them the stylus and let them try it. They will soon learn that with all it takes to create the piece of work on the computer, that, yeah, it is art. And it is an original piece of art.