Foundation Preparation Summer School

About the course

The Foundation Preparation Summer School is now fully booked for 2024. Dates for the 2025 Summer School will be announced soon, or alternatively, our three-day Foundation Prep courses running throughout the autumn are available to book now.

This two-week Foundation Preparation Summer School develops visual, practical, and technical skills to give you the framework to build a varied collection of work that demonstrates your strengths, creativity and interests.

Over ten days, you will be led through a series of structures, workshops and short projects, to help you become confident in fundamental aspects of all Foundation specialisms, including drawing, idea generation, visual research, thinking through making, and collective discussion.

The course is taught by experienced tutors and is a thorough introduction to our approach, ethos, and studio culture.

We will work through a range of conceptual, research-driven and materials-focused processes and activities that will enable you to articulate your ideas, document them, and present them clearly and concisely.

Experienced Foundation tutors will demonstrate how skills learnt can be applied to projects outside this short course, and to select work for applications and portfolios.

The course ends with a collective showcase of work produced across the two weeks in our Foundation studios.

Example course structure

• Week 1 — This first week will introduce key skills such as visual thinking, idea generation, conceptual development, presentation and communication of work, fundamental to the Foundation ethos and approach. Participants will gain confidence in creating conceptually-driven work, both collaboratively and independently.
• Week 2 — Participants will experience the four specialisms taught on Foundation, with a different tailored project each day. Participants will apply the skills learnt in the first week and gain a more in-depth understanding of how those can be tailored to each of the specialisms. The week will culminate with a collective showcase of work produced over the two weeks.

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Course tutors

The course is taught by current KSA Foundation lecturers, who are professional creatives currently working within their specialism.

What to bring

A basic list will be sent to you a week in advance of the course start date. All other materials will be provided by Kingston School of Art.