Â鶹AV

International requirements and visas

We can help you meet our English language or academic entry requirements.

Visas and immigration advice

Portfolio advice 

Before we make you an offer for a place on this course, we will ask to see a portfolio of your work. Sharing your work enables us to see your potential and to understand your approach and motivations.

After you apply we will be in touch asking you to share the link to your online portfolio. You'll be asked to upload the link to .

• Find out about the specific requirements for your course.

Creating your portfolio
We've put together advice and guidance to help you create and share your portfolio, and we run regular online portfolio advice sessions where you can get help from our expert team.

Top reasons to choose this course

• We allow you the space and give you the guidance to think through making, turning ideas into tangible creative outcomes.
• You will gain skills in working with a range of materials and processes, understanding that new discoveries can be made by engaging with materials and processes.
• You will be working in one of the UK's best-equipped printmaking workshops.
• Lecturers are practising artists who bring a diverse range of skills and experience to your learning.
• You will plan, organise and execute exhibitions of artwork for public audience.
• We give you the tools to communicate ideas in visual, written and spoken forms.
• Strong links with local arts communities provide volunteer and employment opportunities.

• Over the course you will develop tenacity, resourcefulness, resilience and self-motivation, fundamental aspects of sustaining an art practice or working within the creative industries.
• There is space to discuss, articulate and critically evaluate your own and others’ artwork.
• You will graduate knowing how to develop professional proposal documents that communicate planned work in visual and text form and include ethical and health and safety considerations.
• At the end of your degree you exhibit a body of work in the university’s graduate show and graduating students often organise a self-funded show.
• You have the opportunity to apply for an exchange program with the University of Nagoya, Japan.

Year 1

You will explore a variety of ways of working including investigating drawing in an expanded way, colour theory and ideas development. You’ll have theoretical lectures and seminars as well as technical inductions into all the main processes of printmaking (etching, lithography, screen, relief, Photoshop and Illustrator). You will be supported to develop research into interests and concerns that motivate you individually. You will also collaboratively plan a group exhibition and take part in a print edition project.

Modules

• Studio Practice 1: Orientation

  This module orientates you to the main elements of studio practice. Research informed teaching introduces you to various methods of contextual and critical exploration that will underpin the development of your practice, informing the development of professional skills. Seminars and tutorials will give you the opportunity to discuss your interests with each other, helping to generate and develop creative ideas.

• Studio Practice 2: Enquiry, Edition, Exhibition

  This module provides you with the opportunity to match your imaginative and intellectual concerns against the constraints and potentials of editioned printmaking, a skill set that contributes to professional employability. This experience will lead to the planning and presentation of a year group exhibition. By demonstrating an increasingly fluent, critically informed understanding of your visual research, you will develop a convincingly progressive printmaking practice.

• Printmaking Technical Inductions

  This module provides technical demonstration and direct workshop engagement with the main processes of etching, lithography, screen printing, relief and digital printmaking processes. You will also compare and contrast the potential of the processes to which you are introduced.

• Theories and Practices of Fine Art: Introduction to Global Art Histories and Art Writing

  This module introduces you to global art histories underpinned by art writing and art practice. You'll explore and critique Western art history, indigenous, decolonial, punk, feminist and queer art histories, high and low art theory, art criticism, art journalism and artist's experimental writing.

Making sure that what you learn with us is relevant, up to date and what employers are looking for is our priority, so courses are reviewed and enhanced on an ongoing basis. When you have applied to us, you’ll be told about any new developments through .

Year 2

The second year is when you really begin to develop your work and your autonomy of practice, testing your ideas and research methodologies, and clarifying what aspects of printmaking you want to refine. The fine art exhibition, held in and around the university gallery, gives you the opportunity to exhibit your work with your peers from other disciplines. A public engagement module provides connectivity between studio and workshop activity, usually a school or an artist led project, and a professional working environment.

Modules

• Professional Development
• Studio Practice 3: Investigation, Experimentation, Public Exhibition and Engagement
• Theories and Practices of Fine Art: Contexts and Specialisms
• Diary Practice: Making Meaning in Times of Global Change

Final year

In your third year the exploration of creative possibilities intensifies as you consolidate your interests in order to plan a resolved body of work for the graduate show. This is an exciting time when the insights and experience gained throughout the course come together to present undergraduate practice at its most inventive, thought-provoking and professional. There is also a focus on the development of your practice after undergraduate study and course has a proven track record of progression to respected masters level courses.

Modules

• Studio Practice 4: Speculation and Integration
• Studio Practice 5: Coherence and Syntheses – Degree Exhibition
• Theories and Practice of Fine Art: Articulation of Your Critical Position

Facilities

The course benefits from top-class facilities including:

• dedicated studio space for each student 
• facilities for intaglio, relief, lithography and screen printing 
• expert technical staff to assist you in workshops and inductions into equipment and technologies 
• essential hand tools available for loan 
• Media Centre, including specialist equipment such as materials for sound, film and photography available for short term loan, computer rooms with contemporary software for digital image processing and manipulation, graphic layout and typography, animation, film and sound production, and editing
• the TECH HUB – a team of technical demonstrators based in Grand Parade who provide specialist creative software support including Adobe CC (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects etc), Rhino, Blender and C4D, as well as web and blog-related software. They manage digital manufacturing services within the School of Art and Media, including laser cutting, 3D printing, CNC routing, plasma cutting and 3-axis CNC milling. They also have VR headsets and 3D scanners. The TECH HUB has its own dedicated PC suite with all of the software they support as well as standard university programmes.
• Photographic Services Unit including well-equipped dark room, studio and camera loan facilities
• department print bureau 
• one of the country's best-stocked specialist art and design libraries 
• internationally important Design Archives
• on-site supplies shop.

Meet the team

Phil Tyler, course leader

Phil Tyler is a practising artist who is interested in the relationship between the materiality of painting and it's potential to act as a cypher for grief, loss and the notion of the sublime. His practice involves painting, drawing, printmaking photography, collage, digital image and writing.

He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally since the mid 1980s including in the ING Discerning Eye, Royal Institute of Oil Painters, The Lynn Painter-Stainers prize, The Garrick Milne Prize, The Royal Over-seas League, East, The National Open and the Whitworth Young Contemporaries competitions and most recently his work was part of an exhibition of 82 British Artists in Poland and well as The Ruth Borchard Prize. His work is in both public and private collections in this country as well as in America, Australia Finland, Hong Kong and Sweden, including Â鶹AV Museum and Art Gallery.

Other staff include:

• Chris Hunt, Ray Dennis, Heike Roesel and Wayne Case (technicians)

Portrait by Phil Tyler

Summer shows 2024

Course fees

The fees listed here are for the first year of full-time study if you start your course in the academic year 2025–26.

You will pay fees for each year of your course. Some fees may increase each year.

UK undergraduate and some postgraduate fees are regulated by the UK government and increases will not be more than the maximum amount allowed. Course fees that are not regulated may increase each year by up to 5% or RPI (whichever is higher).

If you are studying part-time your fee will usually be calculated based on the number of modules that you take.

Find out more

• Â鶹AV Boost – cost of living help for our new undergrad students. Find out about how we can help with your study, accommodation or travel costs and more...
• Fees, bursaries, scholarships and government funding info for UK and international undergraduate students
• Student finance and budgeting while studying
• Read our student contract and (pdf) for more on Â鶹AV tuition fees.

Campus where this course is taught

Accommodation

Local area

Maps

Support and wellbeing

Sport at Â鶹AV