Or if you are building your kernel make sure the Intel graphics modules are compiled. Do a sanity check and recheck the Gentoo Intel wiki

Gentoo isn't scary, take your time and play in a VM - you'll learn to love it's flexibility

This and stick to Gentoo's global sets if you're going with one of the 2 big DEs (like KDE or Gnome), get your system working and then play around. The handbooks are also rimmed with information for most popular programmes, use Arch Linux's guides to as a supplement