Painting and Pixels

The Question I Keep Getting

People find out I build 3D web apps for a living, and then they find out I'm also an oil painter. The next question is always some version of "So which one is the real you?" As if I'm secretly a painter moonlighting as a developer, or an engineer with a quirky hobby.

Neither. They're the same thing. There's no toggle, no switching between mindsets. I don't sit down at my easel and become Artist Chris, then open VS Code and become Engineer Chris. Design engineering is the intersection, and I've been standing in the middle of it for over twenty years.

What Studying Art Actually Teaches You

Many people are surprised that I never studied computer science, and that I hold a BFA in art. The single biggest misconception about an art degree is that it teaches you how to draw or paint. You do learn technique, sure. But the real education is learning how to see.

Color theory. Composition. Value structure. How light behaves on form. How to direct a viewer's eye exactly where you want it. How to create depth on a flat surface. These aren't painting skills. They're visual thinking skills. And they transfer to everything I build on screen.

The thing is, I don't consciously apply them anymore. I don't sit there thinking "okay, let me use my painting knowledge here." It's subconscious at this point. My traditional art background gave me a way of evaluating anything visual, and it's just always running. Like an operating system I don't have to think about.

Molecules, Pitches, Bridges, and Spaceships

Let me get specific, because this isn't abstract. Every app I've built carries this stuff.

Molecular is a 3D chemistry learning tool I built with Three.js and React Three Fiber. When I was setting up the scene, I wasn't just placing atoms in space. I was lighting a composition. The way electrons animate around orbitals, the material choices on bonds, the color relationships between different atom types. All of that comes from the same place as mixing a palette on canvas. You're making decisions about how color and light create clarity and mood.

PitchTrack visualizes MLB pitch trajectories in 3D. I built a semantic color system for pitch types: red for fastballs, blue for breaking balls, green for offspeed. Those aren't arbitrary picks. Red is aggressive and fast. Blue is cooler, curving. Green sits between them. That's color psychology, and I first encountered it formally in a sophomore painting class.

The pitch ribbons use bloom post-processing and emissive materials so they glow against the dark scene. Bright forms against deep shadow. That's chiaroscuro, basically. I also designed multiple camera presets for different analytical views, and every one of those is a compositional choice about what information gets emphasis.

Structle is a daily bridge-building puzzle game. The terrain has custom materials and sky gradients that shift based on terrain type. Beams change color under stress, glowing from green to yellow to red. That's a value and color progression I understand intuitively because I've mixed those transitions on a palette hundreds of times. The environmental design of each puzzle level is a small landscape composition.

And then there's Solar. This is probably the project where my art background is most visible. It's a celestial vehicle propulsion simulator, and I leaned hard into perspective and composition for how the spaceship flies through the solar system. This one sits right at the intersection of 2D art thinking and motion design. The camera work, the sense of scale as you fly past planets, the way the ship's trajectory reads against all that emptiness. That's informed by how I think about perspective and directing focus in a painting. When you're composing a landscape on canvas, you're controlling how someone's eye travels through the scene. Solar does exactly that, just at 60 frames per second.

The Secret Weapons

If I had to name the skills that give me the biggest edge, they're value structure and directing focus. Most developers don't think about these at all.

Value structure means thinking in light and dark before you think in color. Painters do this instinctively. You block in your darks and lights first, then layer color on top. I apply the same logic to UI contrast and visual hierarchy. Where is the brightest element? Where is the deepest shadow? That contrast map is what actually guides the eye, not color alone.

Directing focus is related but distinct. In a painting, you control where someone looks first, second, third. You use edges, contrast, detail density, color temperature. I do the same thing in 3D scenes and interfaces. When a user opens one of my apps, their eye should land exactly where I want it. That's not UX heuristics. That's composition.

The Gap Is Closing

For a long time, the tech industry treated "design" as wireframes and component libraries. If you had a fine arts background, nobody quite knew what to do with you. There was a real gap between how the industry defined design and the actual craft I bring.

But it's getting better. Creative coding communities are growing fast. Three.js and React Three Fiber have opened up real space for people who think visually and dimensionally. WebGL and WebGPU are turning the browser into a legitimate creative canvas. There are more roles now where someone who can paint a sky and also write the shader that renders one actually fits.

Still a gap, though. The industry still tends to put "creative" and "technical" in separate boxes, which doesn't match how I actually work. I'm hoping that keeps shifting.

Two Passions, One Foundation

I still paint. Oils, mostly. Large canvases when I can find the time, smaller studies when I can't. And I still build apps that live and breathe in three dimensions. The two practices don't consciously feed each other. I'm not standing at my easel thinking about shader code, and I'm not writing a Three.js scene thinking about brushwork. But the same instincts drive both. How light falls across form. Where contrast pulls the eye. What a composition needs to feel balanced, or intentionally unbalanced. Those decisions happen the same way whether I'm holding a palette knife or positioning a camera in a 3D scene.

The foundation is the same. It always has been. Every app I ship carries the same visual thinking that goes into every painting I finish. And I don't see that changing, because it's not a methodology I chose. It's just how I see.