For the last 75 years, SVA BFA Illustration graduates have challenged the boundaries of image making, storytelling, critical thinking, and composing the ways we experience our world through print, web, and screen. From the most respected magazines and newspapers of record to experimental online applications, award-winning animation, blockbuster movies, merchandising, or murals — it’s all illustration.

Inspiring, guiding, and providing students feedback to brainstorm, structure, and develop projects that embody personal vision and craft, are key to a successful professional career. Realizing their individual style and aesthetic direction gives our students an edge as critical thinkers with a tested personal process to meet large-scale but also nuanced industry assignments. With carefully designed classes, outstanding facilities, pragmatic career advice, and opportunities for wide exposure – we nurture instincts that an artist can depend on for life.

Assignments are approached by first developing effective ideas and expertly executing them into images reflecting your unique visual voice. In this ever-evolving industry, our curriculum allows you to follow an individual artistic direction by offering solid drawing and painting fundamentals combined with state-of-the-art digital tools. Based on a dynamic teaching plan that revolves around core classes like Pictorial Projects in Junior year and the Senior Thesis, as well as an extensive suite of relevant electives, our students develop effective bodies of work, connecting their passion for image-making to industries that will embrace them.

By working with SVA’s award-winning faculty, students excel in concept and craft with a brush, stylus, ink, or pencil, on paper, canvas, or screen. From Edel Rodriguez’s Time magazine covers, posters by Yuko Shimizu, book covers by Sam Weber, children’s books by Cecilia Ruiz Lopez or Stephen Savage, to Jonathon Rosen’s journal drawings for Tim Burton’s blockbuster film, Sleepy Hollow, our faculty creates award-winning illustrations for editorial, graphic novels, music packaging, branding, toys, concept art, exclusive merchandising, and ad campaigns — connecting our students to some of the most exciting illustration opportunities in the world.

Along with several illustration-specific scholarships and a full-tuition award to a student entering the senior year of study, our students receive a number of distinctions and career paths we actively develop through our extensive network of faculty and alumni.

All of the above contributes to a school culture where, on the one hand, we foster fundamentals that develop the artist’s skill and soul, while on the other, we surround SVA graduates with a professional community of partners, mentors, and expert advisers. Producing talent with such a formidable set of skills, instincts, and support system, constitutes our open secret to greatness.