News

CCC17 welcomes manga artist Orpheus Ganitis to its Artists’ Alley!

Orpheus Ganitis, aka Gun-it-is internationally and Doujima Gyro (銅島ジャイロ) in Japan, is a rookie manga artist, illustrator and story teller. Since April of 2017 he became a university student in one of the most historical art schools in Japan, the Seika University in Kyoto, the same university that created the International Manga Museum. His interest towards manga started with Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し) and since then, Orpheus became obsessed with Studio Ghibli films and anime.

From 5th grade, he has been drawing illustrations and character designs, as well as making his own stories.  In 2013, he move to Japan, following his dream. Studied Japanese for 2 years, passed the N2 level of JLPT (the second most difficult Japanese exam for foreigners) which was his ticket to continue his studies. He then studied manga from April of 2015 to March of 2017 in Osaka Communication Art college (OCA 大阪コミュニケーションアート専門学校). After joining a real manga drawing environment, he realised that his works were still a premature attempt at drawing manga and committed to work hard and improve!

In terms of traditional media, he prefers to draw with pens, water colours, copic-markers and brush pens, while on PC, he uses a Wacom pen tablet. His software of choice, is Clip Studio Paint Pro and some times Photoshop. In order to improve his artwork, he has been taking classic art lessons and more recently, he stared researching other famous manga artists such as Murata Yusuke (村田雄介), Morita Masanori (森田まさのり) and Asano Iono (浅野いにお) from Japanese programs like Manben (漫勉) and Jump Ryu (ジャンプ流).

More recently, he presented his work in various magazines such as Jump +, Jump SQ, Young Jump, Weekly Magazine, Weekly Sunday (etc). He was praised by all editors, especially for his latest work, who found his passion and knowledge towards bird and insects very appealing. It was pointed out as unique and promising for future work. Leaving the good feedback aside, he believes that working at his university under manga artists such as Ouhinata Gou and Tanaka Keiichi, made him more modest, grounded and helped him realise how hard the road to success is. “A dream to live by, a dream to count on“.

Christis Christoforou, also known as Reddo, will be joining this year’s Artists Alley!

Christis is a self taught artist that learned how to draw by experimenting with various manga and anime styles, inspired by titles such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, Bleach and BAKUMAN. He gets inspired not only by the drawing skills of his favourite artists but also by the unique and cool stories that each respective manga artist produces. He says that stories and character developments inspire him the most, rather than the drawings themselves. In the past, he had worked on short films, animating, drawing key frames and other various things that require good hand-drawing skills. He also experimented with tattoo design and graffiti, although nowadays he avoids that kind of work.

To see more of Christis’ illustrations, visit his art page on Facebook!

He spent one and a half years in Japan, learning the language while simultaneously getting as much feedback as he could from magazine and manga professors, in order to improve on his mistakes or bad habits. More specifically, he showed his draft manga to a manga teacher in Japan and an editor of Shonen Jump SQ magazine and was praised for his unique characters that were layered with deep personalities, while his art style was indistinguishable from native Japanese manga artists. The results and feedback he received made him confident that he is on the right track when it comes to manga.

Currently Christis is working his way up in the social media since he believes it is the best source to get attention and publicity nowadays. Furthermore, he is working on a concept for a mobile game, as well as polishing his manga stories. His future goals include to become someone that can produce any kind of project successfully and to live a life where everything he does is equally enjoyable as it is challenging.

We are pleased to welcome back 3-D artist, Kyprianos Demosthenous to our Artists’ Alley!

Kyprianos attended art lessons when he was younger, but feels that he was only able to expand his horizons further when he started self-learning, experimenting with different materials and creating his own techniques. As a young boy, he was inspired by many monster and dinosaur movies, such as Godzilla, Jurassic Park, King Kong and many others. He loves creating sculptures of life-size dinosaurs, as well as making paper guns with real working parts, using materials such as paper and cardboard. He also likes to paint and sketch, to create his own characters and also does a bit of animation.

In 2014, he won the international award for A level art for having the best grade in the world and also participated in the worldwide F1 school competition, for which his team won first place in Cyprus and travelled to Austin Texas, where they competed with the rest of the first-place winning teams from other countries. In the finals, his team received 13th place out of the 32 teams that took part in the competition. A number of Kyprianos’ sculptures and paintings were displayed in the Saatchi gallery in the UK. Currently he is studying Fine Arts in the University of Creative Arts. His future goals include to work in the film industry as a special effects director, to create his own film and animation series and also to work as an art teacher!

Visit Kyprianos’ online gallery to see more photos of his work.

Meet our next Featured Artist, Charalampos Ioannides from Colto Comics!

Charalampos, also known as Colto, was beamed down to Thessaloniki sometime during the glorious golden decade of the 80’s. Right after kindergarten (!), he studied Economics and Tibetan zoography in Hannover. He worked abroad and in Greece, both in the private and public sectors. His relationship to comics and books in general, had always been tight – almost an addiction. Besides his Hellenic mother language, he can read and write in English, French and German. Moreover, he speaks proficient Caribbean, occasionally Farsi and the language of dolphins!

“Caribuenos – Tales of the legendary Captain Mugbeard” is his primal attempt at his comic book art debut, which will soon be available for a broader audience, other than his usual, imaginary friends and the kind neighbour on the 3rd floor.

You can have a glance at his work at the following websites: ColtoComics and ArcTheOriginal.