Painting Drawing and Printmaking
Painting, drawing, and printmaking are three of the oldest and most foundational visual art practices, each with its own materials, techniques, and conceptual traditions, yet each in constant dialogue with the others. Drawing is at the heart of all visual thinking: a means of recording, exploring, and developing ideas that cuts across every other medium. Painting transforms surfaces through colour, mark, and material, engaging with everything from illusionistic representation to pure abstraction.
Printmaking multiplies the image through processes including etching, lithography, screen printing, and woodcut, bringing its own distinctive logic of matrix, repetition, and edition to visual practice.
The three-year full-time Painting, Drawing and Printmaking programme at Arts University Plymouth brings these three disciplines together in what is described as the only undergraduate degree in the UK to do so in this holistic way. The programme builds on their rich history of nourishing and challenging each other, giving you the space, support, and practical skills to discover your artistic voice through imaginative questioning, material experimentation, and skilled invention. You will explore painting, drawing, and printmaking as three interconnected ways of thinking and making, developing a practice that draws on all three and that is rooted in a serious understanding of both their histories and their contemporary possibilities.
A sandwich year and work placement give you professional experience in an arts context before you graduate.
With a typical entry tariff of 120 points, the programme welcomes students who bring genuine artistic commitment and curiosity. Graduates from fine art programmes work as practising artists, illustrators, arts educators, print studio technicians, gallery and museum professionals, and in the broader creative industries. Many continue to postgraduate study in fine art or related areas, and some pursue careers combining their practice with teaching or community arts work.