The ceramics program offers you the opportunity to develop and explore your personal style themes and ideas in clay while honing your technical abilities. You will explore the ceramic form from both sculptural and vessel perspectives, allowing you to pursue your own interests while discovering your own personal style. You will delve into material knowledge through hands-on experiences creating ceramic work, developing glazes, and exploring various kiln-firing methods. Otterbein’s ceramics program will introduce you to various methods and processes for working in clay, including gas and electric kilns for low-fire and high-fire applications, raku firing process, wheel throwing, hand building, and ceramic material calculation and formulation.​

The ceramics studio is equipped with throwing wheels and large worktables for hand building. There are electric, gas, and raku kilns. We make and recycle our own clay using a Soldner mixer and Peter Pugger Vacuum mixer/pug mill, and there is a slab roller. Advanced students learn to create and make glazes as part of their curriculum, exploring tried and true glaze recipes as well as learning to create their own in our glaze calculation class.​

Studying the qualities of the visual and formal relationships form the beginning of your journey into drawing. Through structured assignments, open-ended projects, independent studio work and research, peer review and extensive one-on-one conversations, you develop your drawing practice into an involved experience and long-term commitment. Contemporary, innovative drawing practices and approaches as well as the traditionally major genres of still-life drawing, drawing from the life model and nature-based drawing, are subjects within this concentration.​

Our spacious drawing studio features expansive walls for display of in-progress and completed student art and can be darkened for high light-dark contrast work. Drawing easels allow you to work in a professional manner and a range of dry and wet drawing materials, in color and black and white, are explored.

Graphic Design is art in service to ideas and action. The promotion of nearly every consumer product, corporate service, electronic media and application is created through the work of a graphic designer. Our tools are typography, images, shapes, textures, color and words. Graphic Design courses at Otterbein focus on the foundations of typography, visual dynamics, history of graphic design, poster design, corporate branding, media applications such as advertising and web-site design, package design, publication design, portfolio development and self-promotion.

The graphic design lab is equipped with new iMacs loaded with the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite and a professional Epson large format printers. Our design studio allows students to create visual branding systems, corporate collateral, ad campaigns, package designs and web designs.

The painting concentration is for students with a passion for color and for working in oil paints. It is also for those with an interest in process-based art. You will engage in processes of making that embrace change. Assignments, prompts, and self-directed work invite you to explore possibilities and allow divergent explorations to become part of the completed work. Color, design, abstract and representational imagery, the history of painting and current painting practices, as well as questions about the self and the world we inhabit, may inform your work. You will actively participate in peer-to-peer conversation and critique. While oil paints are the main medium, other mediums may be used in combination with oils in specific Special Topics courses.​

In our light-filled painting studio, we have individual workspaces for you to create your art. The studio also allows for creating larger-scale work in its open center area.

To study photography at Otterbein is to learn not just how to make photographs, but why. Our students understand the social, aesthetic, and historical importance of photographs and make connections between the real world and their art. Our photography classes are small and our community tight knit—but our ambitions are large: faculty lead by example by exhibiting internationally and participating regularly in the Society for Photographic Education; we have state of the art digital and analog studios and equipment and students become masters their craft before their professional-level senior year exhibition.​

The photography areas include a darkroom, a Mac lab loaded with the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, professional inkjet printers, film scanners, studio lighting equipment, and various digital and analog cameras. Across the street at The Point is a large format vinyl printer.

The conceptually driven Video Art concentration is about experimentation and pushing boundaries. Students use moving image and sound to tell stories, make documentaries, create visual poems, integrate performance, realize installations, and more. We recognize the value of collaboration, the blending of disciplines, and diverse perspectives.

Our Apple computer labs are updated with the latest Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, digital and 8 mm film cameras, audio recording devices, studio lights, projectors, scanners, and an extra-large Dell tablet perfect for creating animations. Across the street at The Point (link to the point website), students have access to a woodshop, metal shop, and maker space with 3D printers, laser etching machines, large format printers, virtual reality equipment, and more.