Illustration MA

Program Overview

Kingston School of Art's MA Illustration program emphasizes critical and research-led image production and visual storytelling. The program prepares graduates for a wide range of professional roles, including publishing, curation, and research, while also emphasizing the value of illustrative strategy beyond production.

Program Outline

Visual storytelling is understood in the broadest possible terms; making connections and building relationships between images, words, situations, objects, people and places. We are interested in the potential of research-led approaches to image production to generate knowledge, and we embrace process as a mode of meaning making. Students are supported to craft thoughtful, provoking and illuminating visual stories through a carefully curated programme of study that examines discipline specific notions of rigour, innovation, positioning and inclusivity.

Outline:

Year 1

• Core Modules:
We frame this approach as practice-based research and enquiry-led learning. Research will be established as integral to the act of critical making through experimentation with physical, digital and virtual tools and technologies, embracing a diverse range of multidisciplinary approaches. Throughout this module you will be encouraged to engage with fundamental concepts relating to the production of images, such as observation, curation, facilitation, interpretation, and translation. You will gain necessary critical awareness and practical understanding of illustration processes, to build confidence and develop individual and innovative approaches to practice-based research. You will investigate key current issues within design and participate in urgent critical debates, developing a theoretical and conceptual vocabulary with which to position what you do as a practitioner. Expanding upon the fundamental concepts and methods explored in Teaching Block 1 (observation, curation, facilitation, interpretation, and translation), you will be supported to develop and establish discipline specific research methodologies and put them into practice in order to situate your work in different illustration contexts. You will develop your skills in research planning and project management, enabling you to produce a proposal for your Extended Research Project, a sustained and independent project that is realised in the last module Studio: Extended Research Project for Illustration. You will work on projects individually and collectively that ask you to communicate across disciplinary boundaries in diverse environments with hybrid ways of making and thinking drawn from different contexts, methods and philosophies.
• Studio: Extended Research Project for Illustration (60 credits): This module helps you to build a space for your future practice through enquiry-led learning, conceptual depth, critical imagination, and practice-based research.
You will embrace creative agency as a means of initiating, testing, and completing your research project individually or in collaboration with internal or external partners. You are expected to work autonomously as a critical agent, setting your own programme of learning. You will be supported through peer-to-peer activities, tutorials and reviews in a community of practice. Project proposals will be used to construct student-led research groups based on your chosen fields of practice and a set of specific workshops will support research methods and professional practice. The Extended Research Project (capstone project) provides a framework for you to recognise and engage with a range of transferable skills e.g., time-management, art direction, community collaboration, ethical responsibility, performative presentation, sustainable practices, convivial discourse, social and technological networks. You will consolidate your design practice by taking part in researching, reflecting on, theorising, testing, and communicating the field of graphic design and your place in it.
• Optional Placement Year:
• Professional Placement (120 credits):
The Professional Placement module is a core module for those students following a masters programme that incorporates professional placement learning, following completion of 120 credits. It provides you with the opportunity to apply your knowledge and skills to an appropriate working environment, and to develop and enhance key employability skills and subject-specific professional skills in your chosen subject.

Assessment:

Assessment typically comprises practical (e.g. presentations, performance) and coursework (e.g. essays, reports, self-assessment, portfolios, dissertation).

• Coursework: 95%
• Practical: 5%

Teaching:

Students will benefit from a variety of different learning and teaching approaches including brief-led project work, workshops that encourage creative experimentation and individual critical reflection. We take a dialogic and discursive approach to learning and teaching, through peer-led learning, discussion groups and seminars as well as opportunities to co-construct the curriculum. An elective range of assessment strategies and methods allows students to take responsibility for their own learning.

Careers:

The course interprets professional activity across a broad spectrum. This ranges from established remits for illustration practice such as publishing and commissioned based work to emerging areas in research and public engagement. By approaching visual storytelling as a transmedia practice, students can work flexibly and responsively. We are interested, too, in the value of illustrative strategy beyond production. Our graduates work in publishing, curation, exhibition, and engagement in the cultural sector and beyond.

Other:

• As part of Kingston School of Art, students on this course benefit from joining a creative community where collaborative working and critical practice are encouraged.
• Our workshops and studios are open to all disciplines, enabling students and staff to work together, share ideas and explore multi-disciplinary making.
After graduating they often return to a wide range of international locations. Course modules address the changing nature of communication design in the global workplace.
• The course works in collaboration with organisations and business.
Recent projects include working with Illy Coffee in Italy to produce a magazine that was distributed around Europe and with Draught Associates in London who reviewed portfolios, provided professional guidance and offered internships.
• The course has developed collaborative projects with Hongik University in Korea.

Home 2025/26 MA full time £12,400 MA part time £6,820 International 2025/26 MA full time £21,800 MA part time £11,990 Home 2024/25 MA full time £11,900 MA part time £6,545 International 2024/25 MA full time £20,900 MA part time £11,495