

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.<p>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".<p>I can study visual arts in a public(free) university here(Brazil, public &#62; private here).<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.

