Commonality between Painting and Programming

My girlfriend is an Art major and is currently taking a painting class and I am a CS major. We were talking the other day about the similarities between how she goes about painting and how I go about writing a program. When I first start to work on a program I normally begin by getting a pencil and paper. I work out how I want to represent the functionality of the program’s purpose in code, what things go where and how different objects relate to each other (assuming an object-oriented language). You need to know what every object knows and how will it be interacting with the other objects. This is all to accomplish the program’s end goal, whatever that may be. Now if we think about a painting. When have a concept that you want to get across through painting, normally you do not just start painting and hope it all works out on the fly. The artist will do some sketches to figure out the composition, colors and shapes of the painting. The artist will need to think through how the colors relate and affect each other and how they impact the shapes. Similarly figuring out how all the objects will relate to each other a painter will need to understand before hand how he or she wants all the elements of the painting to relate and affect one another in order to get across the original concept. If you think about it more you realize the process methods for both these things are very similar.