OCA preloader logo
Uca Oca Blog Posts - The Open College of the Arts

To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.

#WeAreOCA

The Open College of the Arts' blog

Browsing Category:

Uca Oca


Visiting an illustrator thumb

Visiting an illustrator

If you could meet your favourite creative practitioner, what would you ask them? Work-related learning, such as visits to studios, conversations with practitioners, or more involved relationships through live projects and placements, all offer direct ways to help inform your knowledge and understanding of your discipline.

Read More
What is unique about your character? thumb

What is unique about your character?

In real life, we share the premise that ‘everyone is unique’. A basic premise, I know – but an important one. When helping students to write creatively it has struck me how in many instances our characters are just the same.

Read More
Writing erotic fiction. Part 2 thumb

Writing erotic fiction. Part 2

In my last post I explained how finding a subject that has nothing to do with sex can turn what has become a necessary scene for your book into something original and engaging. The same applies to your characters – not everyone is youthful and nubile and devastatingly attractive.

Read More
Recycling and reusing in textiles thumb

Recycling and reusing in textiles

Reusing materials, objects and waste to create textiles is a very interesting process, not only because we are giving a second life to the material but also because it gives history to the new piece, a sense of a past life.

Read More
Ensemble in focus – The Hermes Experiment thumb

Ensemble in focus – The Hermes Experiment

This is the first in a series of blogs where I introduce OCA composers (or, indeed, anybody else who might be interested) to UK-based ensembles, particularly those that are young, exciting, and focus on performing newly composed music.

Read More
Point of view- is it okay to ‘head hop’? thumb

Point of view- is it okay to ‘head hop’?

I’m not quite sure why this is an issue that has only been coming up recently with students of mine. Perhaps it is because some are now later on in their assignments, and are challenging themselves with new, technical ways to tell a story. But more and more of my students who now write in the third person have been wondering about Point of View.

Read More
Study visit review: Joan Eardley's 'A sense of place' thumb

Study visit review: Joan Eardley's 'A sense of place'

Saturday morning at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art was the time and place for the Open College of the Arts study visit to the Joan Eardley ‘A Sense of Place’ exhibition. With fourteen students this was a well-attended event, the participants being attracted to an exhibition that focused on drawing and painting enhanced by photographic and archival documentation of the period.

Read More