Find out more about studying MA Illustration at Arts University Bournemouth? We've gathered all the key details, entry requirements, modules, fees, and more. Take the next step by booking an open day to explore it for yourself.
MA - Master of Arts
Arts University Bournemouth
Full Time
Sep 2027
12 Month
The MA Illustration course allows you to further refine your creative identity, offering a bridge between HE and professional illustration practice. It offers a great opportunity for creative professionals to return to university in order to reflect upon their creative practice and change direction. MA Illustration welcomes a diverse range of design practitioners and celebrates a contemporary expansive notion of illustration. The course offers you an active and dynamic community of practice, critical discourse and debate. Students come to us from a number of educational and professional backgrounds, including illustration, graphic design, animation, fine art, modelmaking, textiles and photography, or from academic realms outside art and design. This course is designed to appeal to students who are open and excited by a range of innovative possibilities from traditional methods such as drawing and printmaking, to virtual and time-based media. Experimenting with ideas that might culminate in publication, exhibition or new hybrid platforms, you are encouraged to re-imagine, navigate and resolve your practice. Through writing the Reflective Journals alongside studio outputs, you come to understand research and reflection as fundamental drivers for challenging creative thinking. We encourage you to engage imaginatively with your own contexts and experiences, in order to extend your practice into new arenas. The strong emphasis on career planning enables you to carve your own niche within an evolving global market for illustration materials. Our graduates are supported in addressing the boundaries of the discipline itself through developing new visual perspectives on the world.
This unit drives periods of independent study through which you explore, transform and test your findings to date in relation to audience and context. Reflecting on this will help you determine the Body of Work for the final unit, Resolving Practice.
This unit encourages you to dismantle and deconstruct your own creative assumptions through re-visiting the fundamentals of the subject discipline. It requires you to develop an intellectual depth of understanding of Illustration via the application of critical reasoning. Shared studio activities and workshops enable those of different backgrounds and experience to develop common skill-sets and adjust to new ways of working. Taught sessions divide into three different kinds as described in the Postgraduate Network Model.
Resolving Practice supports you in establishing orderly practice-based research methodologies. In Study Plan 2, you formalise your intentions for presenting and disseminating your final outputs. Through editing, selecting and resolving your portfolio, you gain the confidence to embrace the complex and unpredictable challenges of creative industries. In this way, you acquire the strategies needed for agile and sustainable working practice in your chosen field.
