Illustration (Taught)

MA Illustration is a place where you can develop, test and discuss your work within a community of dedicated staff and a highly motivated and diverse community of practitioners, and with the support of state-of-the-art technical facilities, space to work amongst like-minded, creative people.

MA Illustration encourages active participation in a wide range of creative practices.

The course modules and project briefs are designed to test and develop each student’s own distinct visual methodology leading towards a viable, sustainable professional practice. We explore and develop our visual work through practice, discussion and workshops that provide an entertaining, challenging and supportive sociable working environment.

Practice is supported utilising traditional and / or digital methods of making.

These include:

• drawing and printmaking

• using lens and time-based media

• 3D and 2D working with ideas and concepts that might finally be realised through exhibition, publication or any number of exciting new hybrid forms

Illustration is considered to be a function of an image making practice and as such can be viewed as a means to intervene in a wide range of conversations and subjects.

The process of disseminating or publishing your work is as important to us as the means of production. Audience and reception and the management of this is also a formative part of the wider circle of illustration practice. We recognise an expanded understanding of contemporary illustration through the exploration of relationships between illustrator as author, audience and context and the responsibility of being public actors engaging in social and cultural production.

The course encourages students to engage imaginatively with their practice in relation to an evolving academic subject and to define their own area of expertise. Students studying on the course come from a wide range of diverse backgrounds including illustration, graphic design, creative writing, printmaking, drawing, animation, photography and painting. Others come from outside of art and design, having had experience across other subject disciplines, but who demonstrate a passion for illustration.

Students are encouraged to dismantle and deconstruct their own creative assumptions through re-visiting the fundamentals of the subject. This can be through craft, print and drawing, the invention of storyworlds and characters, animation, gif and meme culture, 3D modelling, participatory practices, reportage and fieldwork, children’s story books, picture books, ‘zines and graphic novels and includes many other forms. MA Illustration students may be critically engaged, political activists, want to beautifully articulate a personal story, or simply make someone smile.

MA Illustration encourages the questioning of the nature of illustration practice and its professional context and the position of each individual relative to the creative industries. Practice will be considered in a global context, challenging colonial aesthetic hegemony with an awareness of the emergence of new and innovative approaches to creative practice that redefine the discipline and the profession.

Students will be challenged to develop a skillset that is future-focused and sustainable in terms of the wider ecological and environmental crisis, the social context of precarious employment, technological threats and the economic fallout of late capitalist politics in the UK. Students on the MA will be introduced to, and engage with, new areas of knowledge and experience, and broadens and deepens existing knowledge that will be combined with their own established practice. We aim to cultivate a visual literacy whereby students develop confidence in understanding and critically reflecting on the representational, technological and cultural significance of illustration, images and visual culture more broadly.