[dagw]

When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas.

There are lots of ways of using a photo as a source. A lot of the 'art' comes from choosing which techniques and paints and colors to use to capture the feeling you are after. You can also choose to make choices like adding/removing elements, changing the field of view or moving the point of view, playing with perspective etc. to make the composition more interesting.

You can give the same photo to 100 different artists and you will get back 100 different paintings with 100 different artistic choices, some of which will appeal to you on an artistic level a lot more than others.

[cntainer]

Thank you for the details, and I agree that what you describe includes plenty of creative effort.

I guess my scenario was much more narrow, as I was thinking about doing an exact copy of a photo that you didn't take yourself. Doing an exact copy limits greatly the number of artistic choices you could make as most of the choices were made by the photographer.

Just found out this is actually a thing called photorealism where the artist is expected to also take the original photo. Feels good to read about something else than software and politics for a change :).