Course summary

Illustration gives you the opportunity to navigate your practice within a supportive creative community, build confidence in your work, develop visual storytelling skills and succeed with a sustainable creative profession. You’ll have access to excellent creative facilities and your own studio space to question, challenge and explore your image-making skills. Underpinning the course is visual storytelling, as well as practice-as-research. Students are encouraged to take their work in their own idiosyncratic directions. There is no predetermined outcome – it is part of the course to develop your own themes and creative inquiries. The drawing and practical experimentation is framed as practice-as-research to provide structure and a theoretical rigour to your work. We are home to the Cheltenham Illustration Awards (CIA), an international illustration competition that leads to a touring exhibition of highly commended entries, presenting an opportunity to exhibit your work nationally. Alumni have begun successful businesses such as The Potthouse Collective, have worked at Meri Meri, Jelly Armchair, and Inky Little Fingers, become freelancers, or moved into doctoral study. Follow our current postgrad students and alumni news on Instagram. Study style Teaching is primarily workshop based and practical. There are also lectures as part of the Research and Context module, as well as guest speakers. The course runs across 2 days a week if full-time and 2 half days if part-time. Definitive information on the timetable can be requested from the Academic Course Lead (see staff section for email address). Illustrators are encouraged to collaborate across courses and take part in illustrating the Creative Writing Anthology organised annually by MA Creative Writers. You will be supported to show your final work in a degree show to celebrate your work and present it to potential clients and employers. We have a careers service called Student Futures which supports professional practice in various ways from exploring your working preferences, to CV writing and interview preparation, to mentorship and business expertise. Day trips are often run to Gloucester, Bristol and London and there are also biannual opportunities to go on international trips. We have connections with Cheltenham Literature Festival and work with the illustration department’s Pittville Press to create publications which are sold at print, zine and illustration fairs. There are also opportunities to sell your work at illustration and print festivals such as Fine Lines, which is run at UoG’s Park Campus. Students explore a diverse and exciting range of ideas, skills and technologies on the course, and we can’t wait to see what you create. For more information and to apply for the Illustration course, please visit the course page at www.glos.ac.uk/Postgraduate