Illustration MA
Subject and course type
- Creative Arts
- Postgraduate
Master the art of visual storytelling. Kingston University’s MA in Illustration will give you the critical, creative and research skills needed to refine your practice and stand out in the professional world.
You are reading:
Realise the true potential of visual stories
You’ll understand image production through connections between images, words, situations, objects, people and places.
Studying this Illustration MA at Kingston University will prepare you for a broad range of professional opportunities. Recent graduates have gone on to roles in publishing, curation, engagement, teaching and more.
Through tutorials, field trips, lectures, seminars, workshops and research projects, you’ll gain technical tools, knowledge and confidence. You’ll share two modules with students from across the design school, explore diverse disciplinary settings and unpack the social and political aspects of illustration.
Every part of this course encourages creative experimentation and individual critical reflection. You’ll take a dialogic, discursive approach, with plenty of peer-led learning, discussion groups and opportunities to co-create the curriculum. You’ll embrace process as a way of creating meaning, and craft thoughtful and illuminating visual stories through a carefully curated programme.
During the course, you’ll examine discipline-specific ideas about rigour, innovation, positioning and inclusivity.
Through a blend of knowledge-building and debate, you’ll bring your unique perspective to examine existing illustrative practices. You’ll explore the challenges, ethics and impact of visual representation across global professional and public territories.
This course aligns with SHAPE, the British Academy’s collective name for the Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts.
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Dear Gilan — Aida Sajedi
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Xiaoshanshui — Cecilia Liu
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Phantom Settlement — Chin Ling Chang
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Inbetween — Rebecca Choi
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I Will Walk Towards a Tree — Zijing GaoT
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Vulva of the Tree — Ziyun Chen
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Why choose this course
While you study, you’ll benefit from top quality teaching at Kingston University. We are ranked Gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework, and our state-of-the art facilities create the perfect modern learning environment.
As part of Kingston School of Art, you’ll benefit from joining a creative community where we encourage collaborative working and critical practice. Our workshops and studios are open to all disciplines, enabling students and staff to work together, share ideas and explore multi-disciplinary making.
Here’s what you’ll have access to as an MA Illustration student:
A dedicated animation and motion graphics studio for hand-drawn, stop-frame, 2D and 3D animation. Facilities include:
- Two post-production studios with 14 edit suites and four edit stations
- Disc production and streaming facilities
- A large studio for broadcast-quality filming
- A range of film recording equipment
- Flexible lighting rigs and controls
- A cyclorama facility
- Specialist sound recording facilities
A wide range of current design-related software, including:
- 128 iMac workstations for 2D and 3D design
- Two teaching rooms for software tutorials
- Locally installed Adobe Suite CC 2017, Vectorworks and Microsoft Office, with Avid Media Composer and Cinema 4D
- Extensive digital printing facilities
Extensive equipment across a diverse range of printing technologies, including intaglios, relief and screen printing. The workshop is also equipped with:
- An A2 risograph
- An darkroom for UV photographic applications
- Epson large format inkjet printers
- A laser engraver
- Letterpress and bookbinding equipment
- Tools and presses from the 19th century to the 1960s
Fully-equipped 3D workshops, including a hackSpace with 3D printers, 3D scanners, CAD and Arduino stations. There are also specialist spaces for:
- Ceramics
- Metal work
- Model making
- Plaster
- Forge and foundry
- Welding
- Woodworking
- Digital
Two photographic studios for small and large photographic works, post-production and plus black-and-white and colour darkrooms.
An immersive lab for virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies.
The Art School Experience
As part of Kingston School of Art, students on this course benefit from joining a creative community where we encourage collaborative working and critical practice.
Our workshops and studios are open to all disciplines, enabling students and staff to work together, share ideas and explore multi-disciplinary making.
Course content
Through tutorials, field trips, lectures, seminars, workshops and research projects, you will gain the technical skills, critical tools, knowledge and confidence needed to contribute to the development of the subject and its practice. You will be asked to examine your own practice and identify existing practice-based research methods, which will then be developed by introducing discipline specific notions of rigour, originality, ethics, positioning and inclusivity.
Modules have been designed and aligned to ensure that students are able to make intellectual links between practice, critical theory and real-world scenarios. In doing so, this programme prioritises the development of an individual practitioner and their creative work.
There is an emphasis on independent and self-directed learning where students are given autonomy to develop a practice that supports their aspirations and ambitions. Skills in critical reflection and analysis provide you with the tools necessary to make decisions about your practice and learning trajectory. Students are provided with the opportunity to initiate, propose, and realise an Extended Research Project (Capstone Project), that is ambitious in scale and scope.
Studio modules include development of illustration skills, concepts and practice through project work and utilise the studio as a site for making. Reading modules focus on critical and contextual theory or issues and positioning practice critically. Presentation modules orientate students within a professional landscape and include preparation for employment through development of future skills and career planning. Reading and Presenting modules are shared with Animation MA and Graphic Design MA Programmes.
Year 1
Core modules
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. By assimilating the learning established so far on the course, you will have built an individual critical position on graphic design, identifying real-world contexts for your practice, and innovative modes of communication in an expanded notion of the discipline.
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. At the end of the module, you will have resolved and realised your intended ideas and ambitions and made this public with and/or for chosen audiences.
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.
30 credits
This module focuses on how to evolve knowledge, ideas, and data through visual and/or experiential outputs that communicate complexity with empathy, audience awareness, and innovation. 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. 
Disciplinary Spaces offer the opportunity for you select a direction for your practice by interpreting and developing content through a distinct lens. The focus of each of the elective Disciplinary Spaces will be reactive to urgent narratives and emerging issues within contemporary illustration practice, such as power and representation, imaging ethics and politics, and co-creation and impact. The projects you undertake will ask you to engage with, and question, disciplinary boundaries through the creation and situation of illustrative outcomes.
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.
30 credits
This module introduces ways of theorising contemporary and historical design to enable you to locate your practice within wider professional, social and political contexts and an interdisciplinary framework. 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.
You will not only develop your understanding of design theory and histories but critically examine different ways of knowing about, and through, design. You are encouraged to question established norms and challenge Eurocentric models of knowledge production, engaging with discourses of decolonisation, design pedagogy, sustainability, participation, accessibility, speculation and design for social change. Exploring a range of different research methods will support you to reflect on your own position, values and ethics as a researcher, and to articulate how that underpins your practice.
30 credits
This module asks you to think about the role of the designer now and what it might be in the future. It takes the position that many of the jobs you may have in the future do not yet exist – it is you that will create them.
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. Real-world scenarios set by external partners will be examined through elective collaborative projects that situate your creative practice within the contemporary paradigms of precarity and uncertainty, providing a space to address issues such as climate literacy, design education and the future of work, and in doing so anticipate contexts for your practice within the cultural and creative industries and beyond.
30 credits
This module recognises the diverse positions and experiences you each have in relation to contemporary illustration practice on entering the course. You are asked to examine your own practice and identify existing methods for image-making, which will then be developed by introducing discipline-specific notions of rigour, originality, ethics, positioning and inclusivity.
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.
Optional placement year
Many postgraduate courses at Kingston University allow students to do a 12-month work placement as part of their course. The responsibility for finding the work placement is with the student; we cannot guarantee the work placement, just the opportunity to undertake it. As the work placement is an assessed part of the course, it is covered by a student's Student Route visa.
Find out more about the postgraduate work placement scheme.
Core modules
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. You may wish to use the placement experience as a platform for your subsequent major project module, and would be expected to use it to help inform your decisions about future careers.
Career opportunities
After you graduate
You’ll complete this course equipped for opportunities in a range of areas – from publishing and commissions to emerging areas in research and public engagement.
Recent graduates have progressed to roles in project consultancy, direction and management. Others are now working in publishing, curation, exhibition and engagement in the cultural sector and beyond. You could even go on to teach and lead higher education initiatives that expand how images can contribute globally.
Links with business and industry
On this course, you’ll benefit from our strong national and international industry links. We collaborate with many organisations to make sure modules address the changing nature of communication design in the global workplace.
Here are a few examples of our recent connections:
- We recently produced a pan-European magazine with Illy Coffee in Italy
- London’s Draught Associates have offered portfolio reviews, professional guidance and internships
- Students have regular opportunities to showcase add to their portfolio through competitions
- We’ve collaborated with Hongik University in Korea, focusing on new technologies, professional networks and new opportunities for designers
Teaching and assessment
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.
Kingston School of Art has an established an ethos of Thinking Through Making, underpinned by a policy that supports equal access for all students to the 2D and 3D workshops. Students are encouraged to explore new and unfamiliar processes and techniques and use these to experiment and innovate within their own disciplines and individual creative practices.
When not attending timetabled sessions, you will be expected to continue learning independently through self-study. This typically involves reading and analysing articles, regulations, policy documents and key texts, documenting individual projects, preparing coursework assignments and completing your PEDRs, etc.
Your independent learning is supported by a range of excellent facilities including online resources, the library and CANVAS, the University's online virtual learning platform.
At Kingston University, we know that postgraduate students have particular needs and therefore we have a range of support available to help you during your time here.
When you arrive, we'll introduce you to your personal tutor. This is the member of academic staff who will provide academic guidance, be a support throughout your time at Kingston and who will show you how to make the best use of all the help and resources that we offer at Kingston University.
A course is made up of modules, and each module is worth a number of credits. You must pass a given number of credits in order to achieve the award you registered on, for example 360 credits for a typical undergraduate course or 180 credits for a typical postgraduate course. The number of credits you need for your award is detailed in the programme specification which you can access from the link at the bottom of this page.
One credit equates to 10 hours of study. Therefore 180 credits across a year (typical for a postgraduate course) would equate to 1,800 notional hours. These hours are split into scheduled and guided. On this course, the percentage of that time that will be scheduled learning and teaching activities is shown below. The remainder is made up of guided independent study.
- 16% scheduled learning and teaching
The exact balance between scheduled learning and teaching and guided independent study will be informed by the modules you take.
Your course will primarily be delivered in person. It may include delivery of some activities online, either in real time or recorded.
Assessment typically comprises practical (e.g. presentations, performance) and coursework (e.g. essays, reports, self-assessment, portfolios, dissertation). The approximate percentage for how you will be assessed on this course is as follows:
Type of assessment
- Coursework: 95%
- Practical: 5%
We aim to provide feedback on assessments within 20 working days.
To give you an indication of class sizes, this course normally enrols 25 students. Seminars and reviews are usually 12-25 students and group tutorials usually 6-12 students. However this can vary by module and academic year.
Fees and funding
| Fee category | Fee |
|---|---|
| Home (UK students) | |
| Full Time | £12,400 |
| Part Time | £6,820 |
| International | |
| Full Time | £21,800 |
| Part Time | £11,990 |
| Fee category | Fee |
|---|---|
| Home (UK students) | |
| Full Time | £11,900 |
| Part Time | £6,545 |
| International | |
| Full Time | £20,900 |
| Part Time | £11,495 |
Funding support for postgraduate students
If you are a UK student living in England and under 60, you can apply for a loan to study for a postgraduate degree on the government's website.
Scholarships and bursaries
Interested in studying an MA in Illustration at Kingston? The following funding support is available:
Get a 40% reduction in fees for taught masters or postgraduate diploma courses with September start dates. Find out more.
Receive up to £5,000 towards tuition in your first year of study. Find out more.
Get a 15% reduction in tuition fees. Find out more.
Kingston University offers a 10% discount on full- and part-time postgraduate degree course tuition fees to our alumni. Visit our alumni discount page to find out more.
Additional course costs
Some courses may require additional costs beyond tuition fees. When planning your studies, you’ll want to consider tuition fees, living costs, and any extra costs that might relate to your area of study.
Your tuition fees include costs for teaching, assessment and university facilities. So your access to libraries, shared IT resources and various student support services are all covered. Accommodation and general living expenses are not covered by these fees.
Where applicable, additional expenses for your course may include:
Our libraries have an extensive collection of books and journals, as well as open-access computers and laptops available to rent. However, you may want to buy your own computer or personal copies of key textbooks. Textbooks may range from £50 to £250 per year. And a personal computer can range from £100 to £3,000 depending on your course requirements.
While most coursework is submitted online, some modules may require printed copies. You may want to allocate up to £100 per year for hard-copies of your coursework. It’s worth noting that 3D printing is never compulsory. So if you choose to use our 3D printers, you’ll need to pay for the material. This ranges from 3p per gram to 40p per gram.
Kingston University will pay for all compulsory field trips. Fees for optional trips can range from £30 to £350 per trip.
Your tuition fees don’t cover travel costs. To save on travel costs, you can use our free intersite bus service. This route links the campuses and halls of residence with local train stations - Surbiton, Kingston upon Thames, and Norbiton.
How to apply
Before you apply
Please read the entry criteria carefully to make sure you meet all requirements before applying.
How to apply online
Use the course selector drop down at the top of this page to choose your preferred course, start date and mode, then click 'Apply now'. You will be taken to our Online Student Information System (OSIS) where you will complete your application.
If you’re starting a new application, you’ll need to select ‘new user’ and set up a username and password. This will allow you to save and return to your application.
Application deadlines
We encourage you to apply as soon as possible. Applications will close when the course is full.
Apply for the standalone module
If you want to apply for the standalone module, complete the application form and create an electronic portfolio showcasing three relevant projects (maximum 10 slides, 10MB). Send both documents to the course leader, Paul Micklethwaite at p.micklethwaite@kingston.ac.uk.
After you apply
If the admission tutor wants to see your portfolio, we will email asking you to upload your zipped portfolio to the OSIS portal within three weeks. If we need more information or want to invite you for an interview, we will be in touch directly. After that you will then hear whether your application has been successful.
Course changes and regulations
The information on this page reflects the currently intended course structure and module details. To improve your student experience and the quality of your degree, we may review and change the material information of this course. Find out more about course changes
Programme Specifications for the course are published ahead of each academic year.
Regulations governing this course can be found on our website.
