Minimum Tariff: 300
UCAS Code: 220
Admissions Tutor: Chris Glynn
Email: cglynn@cardiffmet.ac.uk

Cardiff Illustration attracts students who are imaginative, curious, and astute, to create illuminating translations of our world and our time. For this purposeful discipline, our graduates are equipped to create independent practices, as designer-illustrators, graphic communicators, author-illustrators, designers in publishing, theatre, film, new media, animation.

Year 1 concentrates on unlocking ideas that can be translated into illustrative components: building from the individual, allowing the first glimpse of the ‘voice’. The emphasis is on illustrative perspectives, including those of inventor, interpreter and prophet. In the second half of the year, applied narrative is the chief outlet for explorations of drawing, making and collaborative processes. Choice of media is rarely prescribed: students can experiment with familiar and unfamiliar means, according to their emerging needs, interests and strengths. Research work from summer project ‘Eccentricities and Obsessions’ helps accelerate the discovery of the individual voice.

Year 2 offers the challenge of communicating complex information, using a variety of voices and perspectives: those of fictional and real characters, including the practicing illustrators that students interview as part of the ‘Picaresque’ research project. All second year work is underpinned by discourse, reading and writing, helping the student explore research areas for their dissertation. Year Two culminates with a portfolio of work identifying the emerging professional practitioner.

“To illuminate the world, illustrators need to be bright; to dig out the truth they need sharp minds.” – Chris Glynn, Subject Leader, Illustration

In year one and year two, equipped with the ideas and skills achieved in their subject module, students choose a further module where they can employ, extend and challenge those ideas and skills. The modules on offer will include ones where students will work alongside leading researchers on an enquiry based project, and others which involve them in an exploration of a challenging subject. These include modules on: the figure in art; creative strategies, drawing and visual studies: advanced material investigation; the physical and the virtual; and narrative.

Some of the modules on offer may involve a period abroad, studying in Venice or the States, or might be an Erasmus exchange. There are also opportunities to undertake a work placement or study how to set up your own business. In all of these modules, students respond to the challenges through their own practices, employing the skills and ideas from Illustration, informed and stimulated by the challenge of the module itself and by the opportunity to work with fellow students from across the School.

All students undertake modules that develop critical and sometimes radical approaches to how we see and construct the world. These modules provide some of the tools that can be employed to question through creative practice how meaning is made as well as why meaning is a contested area. These will also equip students for the preparation of their final dissertation. Taught on a cross-disciplinary basis, the content of these modules will draw on anything and everything, from Constable to cosmetic surgery, from Bernard Leach to Elvis Presley impersonators, and from aesthetics to punk rock.

In the more autonomous Third Year, students work towards the final exhibition and portfolio. Content and contexts are refined; stance becomes central. The dissertation informs an area of interest that enhances your practical work, in some cases using practice-based research as an area of enquiry. Helped by portfolio surgeries and professional critique, students continue to enter competitions and generate live outcomes in order to test the impact of their work. This builds the self-assurance required for independent practice and early professional engagement.

Regular ‘Monday Muse’ talks delivered by tutors, guests and students enlivens illustration. Each year we undertake an overnight trip to a UK city, and a study trip to a European city.