Do You Need a Degree to Get Into Comic Art

Full-time and Role-time

W211 BA/CGN

Course overview

Accredited Foundation year Work placement

Kirsty Stebbings, BA (Hons) Comics and Graphic Novels

Kirsty talks about her experience of studying comics and graphic novels at Teesside.

'Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent.' Dr Seuss

Creating comics is more than a job - it's a vocation. We alive in a aureate age for the comic book, in which Far Eastern manga is now part of the popular civilization of the West. We have seen a graphic novel awarded the Pulitzer Prize, 50c funny books of the 1960s turned into iconic, billion dollar franchises and the cyberspace change the way we make and read comics forever. The combination of words and pictures can produce something more than powerful, more exciting and more personal than either solitary.

The mastery of communication through words and pictures is at the heart of this grade. Nosotros aim to produce a new breed of storytellers, each with their own individual, formidable voice. You emerge as experts at communicating through cartooning, agreement how the medium works from the technical aspects of perspective, composition and effigy cartoon to the founding theories of modernistic literature.

Comics are likewise inbound into more mainstream areas of advertising, marketing and public relations - anywhere where a message needs to exist communicated in as unforgettable and universal a manner as possible.

Teesside is ranked joint 17th out of 73 institutions for Pattern & Crafts in the Guardian Academy Guide 2021. (121 institutions participated.)

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Course details

Class construction

Year 1 cadre modules

Comic Volume Studies

Y'all explore the richness and diversity of the comic medium, and through discussion of its most meaning works and creators, recognise how your ain creative practise can be developed farther.

You lot think critically, expand your understanding of what comics are and can do, and recognise new examples of the course to inspire, influence and educate your ain practice.
Your assessment is 100% ICA

Drawing for Games and Animation 1

This module develops your visual perception and drawing skills – these are essential for a productive artist to communicate ideas effectively, swiftly and efficiently.

Yous are guided through a range of cartoon exercises including figure drawing, environment drawing, and however life, enabling you to work through a multifariousness of approaches to drawing. These exercises develop your observational and imaginative drawing abilities, and build on your creative skills and range of techniques, using traditional tools.

Idea Generation

Yous explore a range of method and techniques to generate and develop creative ideas.

You bear out a range of challenging tasks to encourage and develop an effective working do. The unique challenges faced by comic book creators will be identified and explored in terms of the visual paradigm and the written word.

You generate original ideas and develop skills in the areas of narrative development, thumbnailing, iteration and rewriting.

The skills y'all acquire in this module will exist adult and expanded in the subsequent modules and will underpin future learning.

Your assessment is a portfolio of work created in response to a provided brief.

Narrative and Storytelling

Narrative and Storytelling provides you with the opportunity to learn a range of approaches to the creative development and writing of a script.
You explore the structural dimensions of your work including aspects such as three act plotting, character arcs and story sequencing and utilises professional person techniques derived from established exercise in the artistic media industries.
Your cess is 100% ICA.

Sequencing Images for Comics

Yous are introduced to the central pattern, communication and narrative skills to create a story in comic form.

Y'all examine the forms and methods established by some of the most meaning creators in the medium; through experimenting and workshopping with these methods; and through developing your understanding of their mechanisms.

Y'all explore the unique visual language of comic books; how it has evolved and how it is read. You wait at the effects of panel and folio blueprint, of techniques including thumbnailing and composition, and how dissimilar cultures have produced unlike ways of telling stories inside comics.

Your assessment is 100% ICA.

Visual Perspectives

We live in a visual culture. This modules explores how we see and take meaning from images across a range of media platforms including telly, movie theater, the printing and the visual arts.

Yr two core modules

Advanced Comic Volume Studies

You investigate established comic creators and sympathize their unique motivations and practice. Yous explore the different creative approaches comic volume creators have used to appoint with theme and pregnant in key canonical pieces of work to develop a more distinctive and informed creative approach.

Y'all analyse and evaluate the piece of work of key comic volume creators within a social, historical and cultural context, before applying this learning to a do based research project.
Your assessment is 100% ICA, through a portfolio of work and a disquisitional reflection.

Advanced Sequencing for Comics

You lot bring your visual and narrative practise to a new level of professional and artistic skill. Through do, you explore new ways of creating and using images for narrative, including: interpreting written descriptions as images, drawing as a non-verbal course of communication and experimenting with comics' unique interplay of words and images.

You practically explore the relationship betwixt writing, design and drawing in your work. Through critical review of the tools and techniques used by the medium's near significant creators, you develop your understanding of the power of the comic medium to tell stories in a diverseness of ways.

You lot explore capturing action, emotion, drama and movement; look at representation, documentation and communication, and the unique use of time in sequential art. Y'all experiment with means of converting text into images, and translating dramatic tension, temper and pacing into the design, text and visuals of your comic.

Your assessment is 100% ICA.

Drawing for Games and Animation two

The module is designed to develop further skills in drawing and to develop methods of applying drawing in more specific situations. The chief focus is communicating emotional responses through the artwork. It volition encourage you to start developing your ain fashion, and to progress your narrative storytelling in an image.

Life drawing will form a key office of the module, encouraging you to think about showing personality through posing and developing an understanding of characterisation, exaggeration and the utilize of shape language in developing characters and environments.

Exhibition Project

You collaboratively initiate and develop an original and self-directed project. You work together with your fellow students to secure a space such as a local gallery, commercial space, customs centre to organise and execute an exhibition of new work; or to create, fund, design and publish an album of new professional work. You develop your portfolio of professional networks and skills, including projection management, grouping working skills, promotion, likewise as learning networking and presentation skills. You lot too piece of work collaboratively online and to program, create, execute and promote the artefact or exhibition. You are assessed by a grouping project and reflective log.

Pitching the Story

You lot pitch for a professional comic, graphic novel or other narrative art creation. You gain feel of portfolio structure, presentation and pitching to develop and mature your individual creative vox.
Emulating current comic and publishing industry standards, you demonstrate your individual creative have on a set brief, showing how you would explore and develop a character or situation into a visually and narratively adult earth.

You explore your career goals and undertake chief enquiry into the historical and contemporary creators, publishers and movements relevant to your ambitions, resulting in the creation of a career development program.

Your assessment is 100% ICA.

Optional piece of work placement year

Piece of work placement

You have the pick to spend one year in industry learning and developing your skills. We encourage and back up you with applying for a placement, job hunting and networking.

You proceeds feel favoured by graduate recruiters and develop your technical skillset. You also obtain the transferable skills required in any professional surround, including communication, negotiation, teamwork, leadership, organisation, confidence, self-reliance, problem-solving, existence able to work nether pressure, and commercial sensation.

Many employers view a placement as a year-long interview, therefore placements are increasingly becoming an essential part of an system's pre-choice strategy in their graduate recruitment procedure. Benefits include:

· improved task prospects
· enhanced employment skills and improved career progression opportunities
· a higher starting bacon than your full-time counterparts
· a better degree classification
· a richer CV
· a year's salary before completing your caste
· experience of workplace culture
· the opportunity to design and base your final-year project within a working environment.

If you are unable to secure a work placement with an employer, then yous simply continue on a course without the work placement.

Terminal-year core modules

Comics and Graphic Novels Projection

You demonstrate your learning and showcase your storytelling mode or 'visual voice'.

You work individually on a large-scale, negotiated, self-directed project guided by your own creative instincts under the supervision of bookish staff, alongside working collaboratively to brandish or publish your work as a collective.

You develop a sense of work subject field coupled with a professional person outlook, take responsibleness for the planning and execution of your extended piece of work, including the consideration of associated legal, social, ethical and professional issues.

You explore your negotiated project area, and demonstrate the ability to analyse, synthesise, and creatively utilize what you take studied on the alongside demonstrating disquisitional and evaluative skills and professional person awareness.
You produce a substantial artefact related to the field of comics, graphic novel and sequential art and document your research and development process and a viva consisting of the presentation, sit-in and discussion of the artefact.

Your assessment is 100% ICA.

Developing a Personal Mode

You draw on the techniques and theories previously explored and develop your own personal style of storytelling and your own arroyo to work. You lot build and present a professional person portfolio that reflects your manner.

Professional Practice in Comics

You explore the unlike routes into the contemporary comic manufacture past responding to mock industry briefs, every bit well equally 1 real commission or competition entry.

You explore how to place opportunities; how to present and promote yourself professionally; how and when to use portfolios; the practice pitching to publishers; and current professional practice in networking and promotion through conventions, festivals and the internet.

You lot gain an overview of the business and legal information relevant to professional person creative career. Y'all analyse career opportunities, job specifications and potential employers related to your specialist areas of involvement.

Y'all proceeds greater confidence and independence in your professional portfolio of piece of work and your future career planning.
Your cess is 100% ICA.

Studies in Transmedia Properties

Yous explore the professional person comics world in a wider context, and the myriad opportunities that the electric current transmedia manufacture presents to piece of work in innovative creative forms.

You engage with new technologies and approaches to audiences to create work that develops a flexible, adaptable creative manner to promote, publicise and deepen a artistic approach to your work.

Your assessment is 100% ICA.

Modules offered may vary.

Entry requirements

Entry requirements

Year i entry
96-112 points, including a creative subject, from any combination of recognised Level three qualifications. Consideration is besides given to students without formal qualifications merely with evidence of practical creative arts experience at an appropriate level. Applicants may be invited to share a portfolio where applicable to show creative skills in cartoon and graphic novels.

Applicants are invited join us on campus for an bidder day, enabling y'all to see our comics and graphic novels facilities, run into staff and students and larn more about studying at Teesside University.

Non-EU international students who need a pupil visa to written report in the UK should bank check our spider web pages on UKVI-compliant English requirements. The University also provides pre-sessional English linguistic communication courses to help you meet the English requirements.

Helping yous meet the entry requirements
We may be able to aid yous meet the requirements for admission past offering you the opportunity to report one or more Summer Academy modules, some of which can be studied by distance learning.

Alternative degree with integrated foundation year
If you are unable to achieve the minimum admission requirements for Yr i entry you lot could, subject to eligibility, join one of our caste courses with an integrated foundation year.

Direct entry to later years
If you take previously studied at higher education level (for example, a foundation degree, HNC, HND or one or more years at degree level at another institution) you may request straight entry to Year 2 or year 3 of this caste.

Mature applicants
We welcome applications from mature students (aged over 21) who tin can demonstrate, through portfolio/written work and relevant experience, that they accept developed cognitive and technical skills through their life experiences.

For general information please see our overview of entry requirements

International applicants tin find out what qualifications they need by visiting Your Country

For general data delight encounter our overview of entry requirements

International applicants tin can find out what qualifications they need by visiting Your Country

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Yous can gain considerable knowledge from work, volunteering and life. Nether recognition of prior learning (RPL) yous may be awarded credit for this which can be credited towards the course you desire to study.
Find out more most RPL

Employability

Career opportunities

The course draws on existing and new relationships in targeted sectors to offer live briefs for:

• film and Tv - Vertigo Films, Double Negative, BBC, Channel 4
• games - 22 Cans, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft
• advertising - Drummond Fundamental, Cravens Advertising, Guerrilla, Sumo Digital
• comics - Marvel, DC, Rebellion Publishing, Journalism, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent

Expected career routes include self publishing, graphic novel publishing, advertising, marketing, public relations, journalism, brand management, publishing and graphic design.

You lot are expected to do at least one two-week work placement between your second and 3rd years, though opportunities will exist available for significantly more workplace experiences through our placement officer.

Information for international applicants

Qualifications

International applicants - find out what qualifications you lot need by selecting your country below.

Select your country:

Professional accreditation

We are a fellow member of the Association of Illustrators, a professional organisation that supports illustrators at all stages of their careers. You gain access to a wealth of supporting material, a business masterclass each year, discounted portfolio reviews and discounted entry to the World Illustration Awards. Find out more most the Association of Illustrators.

Other course routes

Work placement

Written report this course with an optional work placement twelvemonth, at no extra cost. Alongside this, you can gain valuable experience and date with the sector through our shorter work placements, internships and work experience opportunities.

Work placements

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  James Brady

  BA (Hons) Comics and Graphic Novels

  I'd 100% recommend Teesside to anyone looking to pursue an artistic career in games, blitheness, comics or film. The facilities are fantastic, and I really benefitted from having input from industry professionals.

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Source: https://www.tees.ac.uk/prospectus/ug/ug_course.cfm?courseid=1265&fos=10&fossub=26

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