That's a really bad analogy, because even in digital art where you can pick your color from a color wheel on a monitor, understanding how primary colors combine to become different colors and hues is a _fundamentally_ important aspect of creating appealingly colored paintings, digital or physical. Color theory is about balance; some colors have more visual "weight" than others. Next to each other they take on entirely different appearances -- and can look hideous or beautiful.

This isn't me saying digital artists need to practice mixing physical pigment, but anecdotally, every single professional digital artist I know has studied physical paint -- some started there, while others ended up there despite starting out and being really good digitally. But once the latter group hit a plateau, they felt something was lacking, and going back to the fundamentals lifted them even higher.

If they get mad it's because you're saying this explicitly to be an asshole. The essence of art doesn't have much to do with the mechanical skills for assembling pieces into a whole, though that part isn't trivial. Rather, it's about expressing human thoughts and feeling in a way that inspires their human audience. That's why AI-generated "art" is different in kind from a skilled digital artist and why it really cannot be art.

It may be maddening to them because you are implying that physical color mixing is somehow that one defining thing that makes it art. Imagine someone said that about writing a book: if you don't write it by hand but use Microsoft Word instead, it's not a real book. How would that even be the case? The software is not doing the work for you (unless it's AI).

I can tell you with confidence that physical color mixing itself is a really small part of what makes a good traditional artist, and I am indeed talking about realistic paintings. All the art fundamentals are exactly the same, wether you do digital art or traditional oil, there are just some technical differences on top. I have been learning digital painting for a few years and the hardest things to learn about color were identical to traditional painters. In fact, after years of learning digital painting and about colors, it only took me a couple of days to understand and perform traditional color mixing with oil. The difficult part is knowing what colors you need, not how to get there (mixing, using the sliders, etc.)

And just to add a small bit here: digital artist also color mix all the time and need to know how it works, the difference here is that mixing is additive instead of subtractive.

Everybody has to decide where to draw the line at convenience versus artistic purity. For most, the creative act is in selecting the color, not how you get there.

Do you sneer at those who use industrial pigments instead catching and crushing their own cochineal beetles?

Given the diversity of media involved in digital art, I’m not sure that analogy is a particularly good one.

And to add, like many of his contemporaries, Michelangelo likely didn’t do much of the painting that’s attributed to him.

Are assembly programmers real programmers if they can't implement their algorithms by soldering transistors?