Gray's School of Art: Last, but by no means least

At Gray's in Aberdeen there seems to be a move towards reviving drawing and painting

• One of Stephanie Cook's haunting paintings at the Gray's degree show

GRAY'S School of Art in Aberdeen is the last of Scotland's four art schools to reveal its end-of-year show. It is one of the few remaining schools in the UK to offer a degree in printmaking, and interestingly, instead of leading to increased specialisation among printmakers, it seems to produce confidence and experimentation.

Susannah Stark is a printmaker whose work stretches into other disciplines. She has been much influenced by an exchange period in Athens, and her work has a questioning feel to it, taking inspiration from sources as diverse as Duchamp and classical sculpture. In the next-door space, another printmaker, Hannah Harkes, has created a sandy beach, with inflatable cacti and pop-influenced prints which seem to explore the nature of holiday relationships.

Gray's seems to be in the grip of a revival of interest in drawing, an important component of printmaking. James Vass makes prints inspired by the 18th century satirists, influenced not just by the spirit of their work but by their exacting draughtsmanship. Craig Harper draws well too, though more instinctively, with a touch of Steven Campbell about his strange little narratives.

A number of painting students also present work which is primarily drawing. Karen Howitt explores the potential to create tones as well as lines, making large images with a dark fairytale quality. Chris Wells' drawings are bold and detailed, mixing satire with sharp observations of life and art. One shows his own degree show being dismantled, to be sold or destroyed.

Photographic and electronic media is weaker this year than last, though there is very good work from Kirsty Pender, capturing the flavour of landscapes glimpsed through a car window, and individuals glimpsed in passing.

Among the other students, there is a prevailing interest in skin. Liz Eilertsen comes at the subject from an interest in science, and includes several large close-up black-and-white photographs which major on texture. Rachel Lamb photographs skin too, but is interested in the blurred distinction between private and public. Carey Stuart's photographs are about relationships and intimacy, and she includes a skin-like membrane, which viewers can touch.

Painter Kerry Rodgers has every reason to be interested in skin because she suffers from allergies to several everyday materials, including some used by artists. Inspired by Eva Hesse, she makes works which express and challenge her experience, while Elizabeth Legge makes casts of worn surfaces in the city, creating a portrait of the skin of Aberdeen.

She is one of several painters whose work stretches into three dimensions. Nicola Bonner takes as her starting point a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and makes worms and maggots both the subject of her painting and the major material in her sculpture. Julie Dugan picks up abandoned objects and embeds them into canvas: broken furniture, discarded crockery, a mouldering suit of clothes that evokes the person who might have once worn it.

Stephanie Cook is a very good painter. She makes images from ordinary life – the screens shifting at the window of a darkened room, a pile of dirty dishes or a stack of DVDs – poignant and beautiful. Phoebe Cole is much bolder, but her colourful landscapes show a good grasp of line and perspective which comes from learning to draw. Grace Neal has drawn too, and now takes the silhouette of a terraced house in Oldham and turns it into a strong abstracted shape with which to build her paintings.

In sculpture, one of the stand-outs is Greg Bryce, who likes to work with whatever is to hand in the space that is available, though, ironically, for his degree show, he has created his own space in a Portakabin in the grounds. Norma D Hunter is interested in socially engaged practice, and in Joseph Beuys, though sadly the college was not amenable to her proposal to plant a circle of oaks to mark the late artist's 90th birthday.

Text weaves its way through many of the departments. Sculptor Carrie Ginniver's "room for the physicality of thought" is full of words, as she engages with questions about the nature of being human. Printmaker Roos Dijkhuizen uses letters and typography, whether or not they make up words, in a stand-out show centred on an inflatable tent; and few know typography as well as Levi Bunyan.

Inventiveness is the order of the day in applied arts, from Susan Still, who finds a series of clever ways to address diet and fitness through the medium of maps, to Kevin Cameron, whose wide-ranging practice is highly visual, while questioning the limits of the visual. In three-dimensional design, Kelly McAllister makes jewellery in the spirit of Alexander McQueen, using fur and feathers, while Nicola Walster combines the soft curves of ceramics with beautiful natural forms made out of metal. Not surprisingly, her drawings are great too. Helane Davidson's show is really two shows: one featuring beautiful objects made of glass inspired by happy childhood memories, and another in which she works through suffering serious injury in a car crash.

Finally, in product design, young artists are applying their ingenuity to improving our lives. Francis Newbatt is a pilot, and his CheckAssist system is designed to make the many checks before take-off a more intuitive process. Philip Anderson's 20-Second Soap is elegant in its simplicity, a quick and easy way to encourage children to wash their hands. And Natalia Lozano has come up with the idea of edible packaging for fast food: eat it, compost it or use it to feed the birds. It could just catch on.

• Until 25 June