Having studied drawing and painting in the last few years, composition is one of these things that I just didn't get. Then it suddenly clicked, mostly by switching to photography to experiment quickly with framing (crop it in photoshop), interesting leading lines and such.

It now feels totally natural, but the road to it was totally obscure for me until I just started taking tons of pictures. Interestingly, I now usually focus on composition / shape / focal points "consciously", planning it out, doing designs, while the more "technical" side of painting (mixing colors, brushstrokes, dark/light) is totally muscle memory.

I have made a lot of music, until it felt "part of myself", then tried out painting/drawing, which is now an integral part of my life and way of seeing the world. But my primary background and ultimately my "self-identity" is software. It is funny how art is pretty much the opposite in terms of process: I will consciously and "technically" work on the part that will affect the viewer/listener the most (composition, buildups/breakdowns in music, tension/relaxation, color/shape/form), and once a good "solution" is found the technical part of it kind of solves itself.

In software, I prefer working on system level things, threading designs, database / scaling, embedded systems. The architectural part of the system is very intuitive, I usually have an idea pop up in my head or while showering. They are often wrong, but I take care of that by doing a lot of miniature systems in their own branches and discard them when not good. However, the technical side of implementing that idea of a design is extremely demanding, and needs iterations and thinking and just plain focused work.

Yup. A football player who dashes into space and makes a cross to another player who will be in open space is making tonnes of calculations in his head about moving bodies, acceleration, etc- but he isn't, either. He's internalized such thinking. Same for musicians, and same for artists of any kind.