BA (Hons) Illustration

Stage One

Stage 1 supports your creative development by examining how to generate and visualize ideas, use research to reflect upon your work, and inform creative approaches. At the end of the first stage, you will have begun to apply these skills to identify your voice and to develop the content and meaning of your illustrative work.

• Unit 1: Introducing Illustration will develop your understanding of the basic visual language of illustration, creative strategies, and ways of documenting your working process. You will explore mark-making and drawing, composition, visual hierarchies, and color theory, and undertake visual research and idea development through several engaging exercises.

• Advancing into Unit 2: Visual Histories, you will develop an appreciation of the historical and contemporary contexts of illustration contexts (e.g. Victorian, American 20th century, technical, instructional, and children’s illustration) and survey contemporary areas of practice (e.g. digital drawing, editorial and commercial illustration, graphic novels, animation and concept art).

• The final unit of stage 1, Materials and Contexts, considers how to produce artwork for a range of physical formats and visual outcomes (e.g. posters, leaflets, magazine and newspaper illustrations, book covers, comics, and fanzines).

Stage Two

Stage 2 supports you to develop your practical skills and contextual and creative understanding of illustration, and enables you to start to locate your practice in a professional context by undertaking client-led projects and defining your creative voice and visual language within your work.

• Unit 1: Visual Languages, supports your understanding of how illustration methods and techniques can be applied to contemporary areas of practice such as editorial (e.g. print & web publishing contexts such as newspaper, magazine, and book illustration) and commercial, scientific, and technical contexts (e.g. product packaging, fashion, medical, educational, archaeological and botanical).

• Advancing into Unit 2: Global Perspectives, you will develop an understanding of current representational and interpretative image-making practice both domestically (e.g. in the use of metaphor, symbolism, abstraction, satire and pastiche, diagrammatic and informational illustration) and internationally (e.g. Japanese ‘manga’, Native American ‘Formlines’, ‘Afrofuturism’, Asian, Indian and European image-making). You will also consider current personal and social visual concerns (e.g. representation of LGBTQI+ communities and issues around race, sexuality, identity, diversity, and neurodiversity) and expanded and specialist visual contexts (e.g. self-publishing, activism, street art, and non-paper applications).

• The final unit of this stage, Self-directed Project, supports you to apply your understanding and skills in either a client-led or personal project to create an original body of work.

Stage Three

Stage 3 supports you to build on your stage 2 studies and synthesize your creative practice and research interests across self-directed bodies of work and critical thinking assignments. The units provide a framework that enables you to foster an increasingly autonomous and professional approach to your studies.

• Unit 1: Practice and Research will introduce you to this Stage of study by supporting you to initiate and articulate your emerging creative practice, develop relevant skills and research methods, and refine your fluency in critical thinking. The unit requires the production of a body of work comprising a series of projects or a larger piece of work outlining what you are interested in making together with a supporting critical thinking element in the form of an essay or presentation.

• Advancing into Unit 2: External Projects requires a self-directed project together with a supporting critical thinking element in the form of a case study, business plan, evaluation, written essay, or visual presentation.

• The final unit of stage 3, Major Project requires the completion of a body of work together with a supporting critical thinking element reflecting on and evaluating your body of work in the form of a written essay or visual presentation.