Ask HN: From programmer to painter

[horofox]

I'm finishing comp. sci this year, still young(22) and what really got me into programming(perl, about 12 years ago) were making pages. In that time people used to "webmaster", I probably went the programming/developer route due the fact that "programming is more important" and also, before you know a lot, it's... really awesome.

But... that passion to art is still in me, I feel that is something that my mind tells me that "I should also be good in it before dieing".

I can study visual arts in a public(free) university here(Brazil, public > private here).

Do you guys think that it's a good idea to just study it? By the time I finish it I will be around ~27 and I can dedicate the rest of my time to startups and even drop out if I want to. I'm always looking at paitings and art and I feel that I have to do something about it.

Does anybody here have experience into getting 2 degrees in different areas and can give me some advice into it? What about the new perspectives that you get from studying it? Is it good?

Thanks in advance, you guys rock!

[nandemo]

Olá. Brazilian here.

You don't need a degree in order to paint. Just enroll in a private art school (not college) or "ateliê". If you live in a capital I'm sure you'll find plenty.

As you know, very few people can make a living by painting. Why not make a career in programming and paint as a hobby? You could even teach part time at a private college and still have plenty of time to learn how to paint.

[hugh3]

You're just finishing one (useful) degree and you're considering doing a second (useless) one? This sounds to me like typical end-of-university doldrums with a bit of quarter-life-crisis thrown in.

My advice would be to give the whole full time work thing a try for a couple of years. It may be that your desire to go back to university will abate. Then again, maybe it won't, and at least you'll have some more money saved up.

Four years is a lot of your life to invest in learning to paint, so I advise being really sure about it before you do it. And if you were really sure you wouldn't even be asking.

[freshfey]

To you it's useless, to others it's a form of creativity - why diss it? I wouldn't say art is a useless degree. It's all about what you do with it. Comp Sci is useless if you don't use it for interesting projects.

[skm]

Yes!

1. Steve Jobs studied calligraphy. At the Stanford commencement address he said:

"I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

(Reference http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html )

2. Paul Graham studied painting at RISD

(He writes about art here: http://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html )

3. And, closer to home for me: my co-founder's first degree was in economics, but he still felt something missing, so he got a second degree which started in painting but ended up in design. He ended up with a completely unique ability to think in a both left- and right-brained way simultaneously.

So, if you feel that both programming and painting reside within you, then you are rare, and my evidence strongly suggests that you find some way to nurture these parts of yourself.

[pavlov]

I worked as a graphic designer and digital painter before getting a degree in film editing. I've ended up as a programmer making software tools for artists (and affiliated people in production environments).

If you have a passion for art, don't ignore it. The beauty here is that it's possible and useful to combine your software expertise with almost any other field. You don't have to decide now to go down that route; the opportunities will present themselves eventually. If you're going to do a startup later, the ideas worth exploring will almost certainly stem from experience you have outside of the programming domain. (The world has enough bug trackers and JavaScript frameworks; you'll have better luck making an impact with something else.)

[juanipis]

i studied fine arts majoring in painting. i love the arts in general, but somehow i also got discontented by doing things that does nothing but hang there. and that's why i ended up as a programmer now, to do stuff that works. i still continue doing art-related stuff though.

[pharno]

well, every degree is a plus. with a programming and an art degree, you're sure more welcome to the game developer scene, than with just your programming degree.