Fine Art Printmaking BA(Hons)

International requirements and visas

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

Visas and immigration advice

Portfolio advice 

Online portfolio

When preparing your online portfolio please consider that we are looking for applicants with a demonstrable interest in one or more of the following:

• graphic fine art languages
• fine art prints and processes
• drawing
• collage
• the photographic and text-oriented (including artists’ books)
• a fascination with images from archives, with printed ephemera, or with images culled from the Internet
• image making in its broadest sense including painting, photography and digital.

Find out more about how to create and submit your portfolio.

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, screenprint, relief and digital printmaking processes. You will also compare and contrast the potential of the processes to which you are introduced.

• Introduction to Theories and Practices of Fine Art

  This module introduces a range of approaches used to think about the relationship between fine art practice and the social and cultural contexts in which art has emerged at various periods. Attention is paid to how artworks and art practices embody changing ideas, meanings, values and effects.

  Students from all fine art areas take part, enabling interdisciplinary dialogue. The module explores historical contextualisation appropriate for studio practice, supporting the development of library-based research and academic skills.

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 Student View.

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 artists led project, and a professional working environment.

Modules

• Artist Journal: Materiality of Practice, New Perspectives and Online Audiences
• Studio Practice 3: Investigation, Experimentation, Public Exhibition and Engagement
• Theories and Practices of Fine Art: Contexts and Specialisms

Options*

• Option module

*Option modules are indicative and may change, depending on timetabling and staff availability.

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.

Click the image above to take a tour of our facilities.

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 Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.

Read a Q+A where Phil talks about his artistic career and route into teaching.

Other staff include tutors Jane Fox and Johanna Love and technicians Chris Hunt, Ray Dennis, Scarlett Tierney and Wayne Case.

Portrait by Phil Tyler

Course fees

The fees listed here are for the first year of full-time study if you start your course in the academic year 2023–24.

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

• Fees, bursaries, scholarships and government funding info for UK and international undergraduate and postgraduate students
• Student finance and budgeting while studying
• About the university’s fees by checking our student contract and tuition fee policy (pdf).

Campus where this course is taught

Accommodation

Local area

Maps

Support and wellbeing

Sport at Brighton