MA Illustration and Visual Media

Course overview

MA Illustration and Visual Media provides a critical space in which traditional definitions of this field can be challenged, deconstructed and reconfigured to provide a unique platform from which our graduates can move into professional practice as autonomous artists.

What can you expect?

MA Illustration and Visual Media is distinctive in its emphasis on students developing their own bodies of work. We do not believe that illustration is a philosophy of practice or self-contained discipline in the contemporary visual world - moreover it is one of many contexts in which images may exist on or offline. Through experimental practice-led research, you will develop an independent and critical relationship to the contemporary image, with the potential to work across a broad range of specialist visual media.

You will have access to LCC's significant resources in digital and time-based media alongside printmaking, 3D and photography. This environment encourages experimental and reflective practice and the opportunity to work alongside your peers in technical workshop and studio environments. The course begins by helping you to position yourself with a critical understanding of working as an artist-researcher at postgraduate level. Through studio and seminar sessions you will be introduced to a range of critical and theoretical ideas, and explore the ways in which artists use research, which will develop your ability to contextualise your own practice.

Careers and alumni

Graduates from this course have gone on to work in a range of professions in the creative world including practising artists, freelance image makers, art writers, curators and commercial galleries, as well as progressing to further study at PhD level. One of your key attributes will be an ability to translate narrative images across media. You will have the facility to deploy narrative illustrative content in books, online, animation and interactive and environmental settings. This will be coupled with an agile critical perspective ensuring you have the creative drive to sustain a career in the creative industries.

Educational level may be demonstrated by: Honours degree; Possession of equivalent qualifications; Prior experiential learning, the outcome of which can be demonstrated to be equivalent to formal qualifications otherwise required; Or a combination of formal qualifications and experiential learning which, taken together, can be demonstrated to be equivalent to formal qualifications otherwise required.