Digital airbrushing, analog airbrushing, and regular old brushing

I take back everything I said this morning about the perniciousness of photoshopping images. Verily, there is no way modern women can live up to the unrealistic example set in digitally retouched images like these:





Oh. Wait. Check that.

None of those are photoshopped. In fact, none of them are even photographs.

Those are (top to bottom) an oil painting by Alyssa Monks, an (analog) airbrush piece by Dru Blair, and some drawings by Juan Francisco Casas executed with BLUE BALLPOINT PEN.

If people want images of unrealizable beauty then that's exactly what they'll get, with or without expensive software packages from Adobe. There is no reason to arbitrarily restrict artwork which is done in whole or in part digitally. None.

(All pictures via WebUrbanist.)

PS I can't wait to see the moral panic people will whip themselves up into when sub-surface scattering gets good enough to routinely render convincing human skin.

PPS I actually don't think we're going to replace human models with CGI for a very, very long time, even if we are technically capable of doing so shortly. It's just too cheap and easy to put a person in front of a camera and tell them what to do, compared to needing a team of modelers and shaders for a digital rendering.