BA (Hons) Video Game Digital Art with a Foundation Year

The course covers both core and technical art skills. It starts with helping you develop your core art skills, so expect to be doing a lot of drawing and studying topics including colour theory, composition, value and tone. Once we’ve covered the fundamentals we’ll move onto supporting you develop your technical and digital art skills. You will focus on 2D and 3D graphics covering texturing, user interface design, environment art, character art, animation and art pipelines for interactive products.

Building upon your core and technical art skills, in the first year after your foundation year you will be tasked with a specific role within our in-house game development studio over the summer term. This work experience gives you the opportunity to apply the knowledge and professional practices you’ve learnt on the course in a safe and supportive environment. Typically for these projects you’ll be using industry-standard game development tools such as Unity and Unreal. These summer projects have in the past been mentored and supported by external partners such as Red Bee Media, FreeStyleGames and Codemasters. The work you’ll produce during these summer placements can act as excellent portfolio pieces, demonstrating your ability as both a professional artist and effective team member.

Throughout your degree, you will be provided with a structured programme of learning, in line with your chosen specialism of video game art. The course culminates with a project you define yourself which targets a specific subsector of the games industry, such as character art, environment art or user experience (among others). You have the choice of either proposing your own individual project or collaborating with other students to create another video game project for your portfolio.

Teaching takes place in a modern campus based in Birmingham City Centre where you’ll be provided with studio space to complete projects and all the software you’ll need for the duration of the course.

You will be taught by staff with significant experience in the video game development industry, having worked with game developers including, Free Radical Design, Codemasters, Freestyle Games, Sega and EA Games.

So, by the time you graduate, you'll have tangible, games development studio experience under your belt, ready to launch your dream career as a games developer.