Chapter 6

Learning the craft

The craft is essentially not taught. The chapter argues that this is not a total failure of universities – theory and research degrees are valuable and should not be dismissed – but a failure of universities pretending to teach craft, when in fact it transmits by mentorship, guidance, osmosis and, heavily, self-teaching. The evidence offered is one self-taught path: an artist drawing comics on paper, then Photoshop and graphics tablets, then Flash animations and the small scripts in its authoring tool, ending in Eclipse writing ActionScript, with no point at which the artist became a programmer. That path is also the argument: drawing is not intuition and feeling but near-algorithmic concepts trained by studying anatomy, movement, perspective and light, and programming has the same shape – clear rules, thought processes, and elaborate abstract constructs built in thought before being put into the machine.