Illustration

On BA (Hons) Illustration at AUB, you will experiment, test, and develop your creative practice. Curriculum and studio culture is prioritised around the space to build fun and engaging cultural product. In this environment, you will shape a skillset with appropriate tools, media, and conceptual approaches. With this aim in mind, students take part in workshops, lectures, seminars and more within our curriculum focused illustration studios located in Arts University Bournemouth’s exciting cultural learning specialised campus.

Illustration is a way of seeing and understanding the world as well as a way of applying image making skills in a commercially relevant way. Throughout the course you will challenge and interrogate the way you think about illustration, imagery, and style, guided by a dynamic course team consisting of specialist practitioners. Visiting lecturers and industry partners also place considerable emphasis on the realities of working within the professional environment and the wider creative community.

Overall, the course aims to foster rich, distinctive illustration-based practice. You will explore a range of processes and techniques from drawing, painting, and printmaking, towards digital painting, moving image, games art, CGI and more! This broad palette of creative strategies will let you hone and choose your own professional visual identity. The intention is for you to build a tool kit enabling connection and communication with diverse audiences across the multitude of contemporary platforms accessible in our world today.

By the end of the course you will be able to...
+ Relate the specialist knowledge and skills that you have chosen to develop on the course to the dynamic possibilities of the commercial and cultural creative landscape.


+ Critically evaluate discourses and practices, making informed judgements using an appropriate range of sources from both within and beyond the field of illustration.


+ Make coherent visual statements integrating observation, analysis, interpretation, and speculation.


+ Develop and refine ways of making and thinking about image through engagement with cultural, social, environmental, theoretical, and historical contexts.


+ Apply transferable skills, exercise initiative and personal responsibility with the ambition of building sustainable post degree audience-based practice.

At Arts University Bournemouth, you’ll study at one of the UK’s leading specialist creative universities, joining a vibrant, collaborative community built around art, design, media, and performance.

With students and staff from over 60 countries and more than 30 creative courses across four specialist schools, AUB's a place where creativity and new ideas are encouraged and individuality is celebrated. From film and fashion to animation, design, architecture, and performance, you’ll develop practical skills and industry knowledge through hands-on, studio-based learning.

You’ll be preparing for a future in the UK’s creative industries sector - one of the country’s biggest employment sectors and worth £124 billion to the economy every year.

With guaranteed accommodation for all first-year students and set near award-winning beaches, AUB also offers an inspiring location where creativity can thrive both on and off campus.