Skills we look for

Go to as many life drawing classes as you can. These may be available to you as part of your current course; if not, find evening or weekend classes. If you can’t attend a life drawing class in person, there are classes and sessions available online, Stan Propokenko (Proko) has good tutorials on his YouTube channel. You can never have enough life drawing practice, it is the basis upon which all your other artistic skills depend. Pay particular attention to proportion. This is essential for all of our degrees.

Search 'Andrew Loomis PDF' online and you will find PDF files of some of the best drawing advice ever written. Andrew Loomis was one of the great art teachers of the 20th century. His books are out of print but animators consider them some of the best advice for life and perspective drawing. Reading them and doing the exercises will improve your skills. His most useful books for animation students are 'Figure Drawing' and 'Successful Drawing'.

You need to be able to draw confidently in one and two-point perspective. We will teach three-point perspective on the course, but you need to have mastered one and two-point before arriving. Read books by Andrew Loomis for advice. Draw perspective grids before drawing and go out and draw lots of buildings. This is essential for all of our degrees.

Drawn on the computer or on paper, you should have front/back/side and three-quarter view drawings of character designs from your own imagination, in colour, to scale. Please avoid clichés like ninjas, space marines, orcs, elves, zombies, and copies of heavily stylised manga characters or Disney characters. Designs of props and pose sheets and facial expressions and phoneme sheets show extra effort. When drawing environment designs, make correct perspective drawings/paintings of an entire scene, and also show separate images for individual objects such as buildings in those scenes – these can be drawn from front, side and top down views. If you work on paper make sure you take good photos of your drawings – tape them to a wall that has even lighting across it (preferably daylight from a north facing window if you live in the Northern hemisphere, do the opposite if you live in the Southern hemisphere) place them at your head height and take photos – these will be flat on and will look better than putting them on the floor and taking a photo of them at an odd angle with your shadow falling across them. If they are small enough to be scanned, then use a scanner to make digital copies of them.

Apart from life drawings of humans, we like to see drawings of animals too. The same advice covers human life drawings – accurate anatomy, careful proportion and good shading / painting. If you can draw them from life rather than photos that’s even better. If you enjoy drawing or painting animals show us your best images. This is not an essential requirement for any of our degrees, so don’t spend time on it if you need to use that precious resource working on essential areas of the portfolio.

This is not essential for any degree but if you can show video evidence of tools/scripts/plugins/rigs you have created for 2D and 3D software, or examples of coding for interactive games, then we would like to see this as well. This might be best demonstrated by videos showing the coding functioning. If you need to capture video of your computer screen we recommend OBS Studio which is free and very easy to use.

For the comics and concept art and the 2D animation degree, we would like to see any kind of representational imagery that demonstrates your knowledge of colour, composition and design that doesn’t fit into the above areas. These can be made digitally or traditionally on paper. They might include landscapes, still lives, portraits, anything creative that isn’t covered by the other criteria on this page.  If you are applying to the 3D degrees and have this sort of artwork, please show it to us, however it is not so essential for them.

We like to see some pages from sketchbooks, the images that show you developing ideas, doodling characters or drawing people on the train or the bus. We don’t need to see every page in your sketchbook, but a selection of your best images may well be the part that makes us realise how creative you can be. Often applicants will show us the artwork their teachers don’t like in their sketchbooks, and this has on some occasions, helped us make a decision about offering a place. We don’t want to see sketchbook pages that are just copies of other artist’s work, or collages of postcards and clippings from magazines and printed out websites, despite how much your art teacher might like them. We are only interested in seeing your designs and art.

We like to see photos of realistic sculptures you have made – human forms, animals, even your own character designs modelled in sculpy / clay / plasticene. Try to take these photos outdoors under natural light if you can. This is not an essential requirement for any of our degrees, so don’t spend time on it if you need to use that precious resource working on essential areas of the portfolio.