Slade Summer School
Our Summer School programme runs from July to the beginning of September.
All of our courses are taught by practicing artists with an understanding of, and sensitivity to, the different levels of experience and needs of our short course and Summer School students. Many students create an extended programme of study and choose multiple courses to advance their skills and interests. We offer an exciting and lively environment for students to test their abilities and experiment while learning new skills and different approaches to making art.
More courses will be added, once confirmed, mid-January 2025.
Drawing
©Slade School of Fine Art
Monday–Friday 10:00am–4:30pm
07 July– 8 July / 2 weeks
Course tutors: mixed
Fee: £900
Level: Varying levels of experience
Course Description
This course will introduce you to the essential first principles of drawing through group and individual tuition and help you develop your own practice and individual vision.
Each day you will explore particular aspects of drawing and experiment with a variety of techniques and materials. These include traditional methods of working such as observation of objects, the human form and light; the use of line, measurement, scale, and proportion; the organisation of pictorial space; materials and surface; investigating transcription and translation of existing art works; contemporary ideas about spontaneity, memory, imagination, abstraction and construction, and recording the creative process.
In the second week, you'll be encouraged to explore and nurture ideas through drawing. You will develop your own art practice and personal vision at your own pace. Regular critiques of work will be held, along with discussions of future plans at the end of the course.
Papermaking with plants
Photo credit: Jenny Goh
Monday–Friday 10:00am–4:30pm
7 July–11 July / 1 week
Course tutors: Robert Mead and Sarah Pettit (Slade Materials Research Associates)
Fee: £475 (including a materials levy of £25)
Level: Varying levels of experience
Course Description
This course will introduce traditional paper making techniques and will focus on the processes involved in transforming plants like stinging nettles and straw into paper. There will be an experimental approach to the craft of paper making. We will explore different materials that have been used historically to make paper and use plants and materials that we find around us now to create new and exciting surfaces to work with.
Making your own paper offers an opportunity to sustainably create an art surface that can reflect our surroundings using readily available natural materials. The history of papermaking is full of examples of people experimenting with and making use of waste materials and plants that are growing close at hand. The first papers that were made in China were said to have been made from things such as old fishing nets and scraps from the processing of hemp plants into textiles. Almost two thousand years later we can still adapt and experiment with these methods.
During this course we will process different plants to extract their cellulose fibres to make a paper pulp. We will make a simple mould and deckle which will be used to turn the pulp into sheets of paper. We will also explore different ways to finish our papers, with sizing and burnishing. There will be a specific focus on making paper as a surface for our individual art practices and we will consider and experiment with the different ways it can be used.
The Art of Looking: How do you tell a good painting from a bad one?
credit: Rose Davey
Monday–Friday 10:00am–4:30pm
14 July–18 July / 1 week
Course tutors: Rose Davey
Fee: £450
Level: Varying levels of experience
Course Description
This week-long course will equip students with the necessary tools to identify quality within artworks and explore the many problems this exercise poses. Artworks will be pitted against one another to provoke lively debate and better understand why one work or artist might be perceived as ‘better’ or more ‘valuable’ than another.
Students will be schooled in the art of looking through the identification of the formal values inherent in art that can discreetly ensure an artwork's quality, and the seductive nature of symbolic value which can often propel an artwork to fame. Time will also be spent considering the process of making art, including a visit to a contemporary artist's studio. The course will be structured around lectures and seminars at the Slade, and intense debate whilst stood in front of original artworks. Gallery visits will range from world-class collections such as the Tate Modern and National Gallery, to lesser-known commercial galleries showing the work of students fresh out of art school. The course will culminate in students delivering a short presentation on an artwork they perceive to possess quality, in contrast to those they consider to be lacking in quality. The aim is to leave with a curious, critical eye, educated through the observation of the artwork, combined with a knowledge of the context in which it was made. This course is an ideal follow-on from Rose's Easter Art History course 'The Original Masterpiece'.
From drawing to developing painting practice
Photo credit: Jenny Goh
Monday–Friday 10:00am–4:30pm
21 July–1 August / 2 weeks
Course tutors: mixed
Fee: £900
Level: Varying levels of experience
Course Description
This course acts as a bridge should you wish to extend your experience of drawing and consider how it might be developed into painting, whilst contemplating how these two disciplines cross over and inform one another.
During week one you will be exploring some of the formal issues of drawing through observation. Special emphasis is put on looking carefully at tone and mark-making, the translation of tone and line into colour and the role of colour in both painting and drawing.
In the second week you will investigate strategies to generate fresh imagery, looking at extending paint handling, translating, transferring and composing new images using a variety of materials. The course offers a new approach to perceiving and making visual work each day, and as such provides a rich ground of methods from which to build and explore personal ideas after leaving. Tuition addressing your personal development will be woven through the taught studio sessions. This course is an ideal pre-cursor to our Painting courses, where students can build on these to branch out into an investigation of their own ideas.
Painting
©Slade School of Fine Art
Monday–Friday 10:00am–4:30pm
21 July–1 August / 4–15 August / 18–29 August / 2 or 4 or 6 weeks
Course tutors: Virginia Verran + other tutors tbc
Fee: £900 per 2 week course
Level: Varying levels of experience. From beginners to painters with an independent practice, but some previous experience in drawing will be helpful.
Course Description
This course will give you the support and guidance needed to develop your own independent practice. You will be setting up a studio-based study to evolve your own practical and aesthetic interests. This will be supported by a series of optional morning workshops including: working from secondary sources, mixing and applying colour, discussing supports and grounds, methods demonstrations, and learning some of the essentials of the painter’s craft.
A life model can be booked on selected days to generate source material. There will be individual tutorials, slide shows and group critiques run by invited artists, representing a wide spectrum of professional practice in terms of style and subject matter. This course may be followed for two or four weeks as appropriate.
Observation and colour- still life painting with eye and brain
Monday–Friday 10:00am–4:30pm
4–8 August / 1 week
Course tutors: Kate Hopkins
Fee: £450
Level: This course is suitable for varying levels of experience. From beginners to painters with an independent practice. Some previous experience in drawing will be helpful.
Course Description
This course teaches strategies that inform observational painting. It is designed to help you set up and respond in more nuanced ways to a still-life practice, by offering further perceptual insights with the potential for inspiring new ideas.
You will learn: to carefully and effectively observe relationships between objects and the space they occupy; how to use colour to create illusions of light and form - a 'pictorial colour space'; and to consider colour relationships (perceived and on the palette), illusory edges and other phenomena.
In addition, you will develop your awareness of the surprising issues of our perception of size, shape and colour involved in still life painting. This practical course will reveal unexpected phenomena about how we perceive the world. Through daily practical painting exercises and talks, you will scrutinise scale, shape, tone and colour, and consider painting in the light shed by the psychology and neuroscience of vision.
This drawing and painting course is inspired by ‘Eye and Brain’ by Richard L. Gregory, explaining “how we see and what we see, including the strange phenomena of illusions” alongside more recent developments in cognitive neuroscience.
Colour in practice
Monday–Friday 10:00am–4:30pm
11 August–15 August / 1 week
Course tutors: Caroline de Lannoy
Fee: £450
Level: Varying levels of experience
Course Description
This five-day course offers students the opportunity to develop both a critical and practical understanding of colour theory. The emphasis of the course is to examine the science of colour and light with a view to its practical application. The teaching method is structured around a series of lectures, demonstrations and creative projects. Lectures include an exploration into the history and theory of colour, colour systems and terminology, meaning and concepts. The theory is complemented with practical sessions through a series of structured exercises that elucidate the expressive, symbolic, scientific and cultural aspects of colour perception. Using a range of materials and techniques from paint to collage, we will explore how colour behaves, the relationship of one colour to another and the way that colour generates light and form to create a colour space. All work will be made by hand with low cost materials.
Note that we will not be working digitally, but will address the role colour plays in these fields in the lectures and discussions. We will develop methods to find a personal approach to subject and the dynamic articulation of colour. Students will be encouraged to consider the role of colour in historical and contemporary (predominantly Western) art practices and in relation to their own artistic development. It is our aim that students leave the course with a better understanding of the role of colour plays in their work, which will contribute to the development of a body of personal work within their own time.
Life painting
Monday–Friday 10:00am–4:30pm
18–29 August / 2 weeks
Course tutor: Andy Pankhurst
Fee: £900
Level: Varying levels of experience. From beginners to painters with an independent practice, but some previous experience in drawing will be helpful.
Course Description
This two-week course will give you the opportunity to work directly from a life model for two weeks. You will explore working ideas of initial compositional drawings and colour studies together with the nature of painting from sustained observation and concepts connected to it.
The course will begin with an initial introductory slide talk with the first two days focusing upon drawing aspects such as: proportion, tone, temperature and composition. The remaining time of the first week will be a combination of quick day and two-day colour studies and paintings from the life model.
Our second week will be working from the life model in a sustained pose for the whole duration of that week utilising lessons and concepts learnt.
Working collaboratively together with the model through a creative process we will explore varying possibilities of poses, compositions and colour environments which sets the models pose and set-up for the week as a group, including participants working spaces.
One-to-one tuition will be offered on the experience of a sustained visual exchange: perceptual shifts taking place between the artist & subject, colour mixing, tone & temperature, form and the role of structure in terms of proportion and spatial relationships. Essentially studio time working from the model will be interspersed with demonstrations, discussions and slide talks including, and not limited to, colour theory, perception and colour mixing.
The final session of the two weeks will be devoted to feedback and support for continuing after the course finishes.
General information
Applicants
Short Courses are open to anyone aged seventeen and over.
Students under the age of 18
Slade Short Courses are designed for adults and the students attending our courses usually span a wide range of ages. For those students interested in attending a short course who are below the age of 18 (17+), we ask you to provide the following documents in addition to the application form so that we may consider you:
A letter from the Headteacher, Deputy Headteacher, Head of Year or art teacher at your school stating your suitability for the course and
A letter from your parent or guardian confirming that personal liability and contents insurance has been set up for you.
Booking and payment
To book a place, please go to the UCL Online Store by following the links to the UCL Shop above.
Course fee
The course fee covers tuition. The course fee does not include materials, you must supply all materials yourself.
Refunds and cancellations
Cancellations are permitted up to one month before the start of a course, subject to a £25 cancellation fee. Refunds will not be made for cancellations less than one calendar month before the start of a course. Students who do not attend due to illness, personal or professional commitments do not have the right to a refund. For this reason we recommend that students take out personal insurance against any unforeseeable circumstances before the start of their course.
Before you start
Further course details and a materials list will be sent to you before the course begins.
Location
In person short courses will take place at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, unless stated otherwise. Online courses will take place online (please make sure you have a suitable internet connection). Details will be confirmed upon receipt of payment.
Access
If you have any specific access needs, we will need to know about your access requirements in advance. Please tell us about your needs in confidence by emailing sladeshortcourses@ucl.ac.uk or by phone on 020 7679 2317.
Safety
Short Course students are required to sign a Safety Compliance Form as part of UCL Health and Safety regulations.
Further information
Please contact the Slade by emailing sladeshortcourses@ucl.ac.uk .
Disclaimer
The information given above is accurate at the time of publication. However, the Slade School of Fine Art reserves the right to cancel or amend courses if circumstances require it.