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Artist Profile: Christos Loizou

14/08/2017 by

Today’s Featured Artist is the young illustrator Christos Loizou!

Christos is a 17 year-old artist that started drawing comics, cartoon and video game characters from a very young age. By the age of six, he started participating in different types of art classes and has won multiple competitions, including second place in a Pan-Hellenic competition as well as a scholarship to Studio 8, School of Art and Design.

He enjoys working with both traditional and digital media, but most of the time he prefers to use acrylic paint, inks and pencils. His inspiration most of the time comes from games such as Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid, Borderlands and a few other indie games that have great stories. His biggest aspiration is to work on an AAA game as a concept artist!

Visit Christos’ page on Facebook to see more images of his work!

 

Artist Profile: Christis Christoforou (Reddo)

12/08/2017 by

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.

 

Artist Profile: Elpida Kyriakou (Elysper)

11/08/2017 by

Illustrator and concept artist Elpida Kyriakou is returning to CCC17’s Artists’ Alley!

Elpida (aka Elysper), is a 20-year-old primarily self-taught artist from Limassol. She enjoys working with traditional and digital media just the same and likes to practice both. She can transition from inks and pencils on paper, to colored illustrations or even pixel art in programs like Photoshop. Her inspiration is mostly drawn from the Eastern Asian and Western culture, as well as comics and her aim is to one day create a comic that combines both styles.

She is currently working as a freelance illustrator and concept artist, doing private commissions and working as a character or environment artist in video games like Elysian Shadows. She has also experimented in sculpting, and creating small handcrafts such as jewelry. Meanwhile, she just began her studies in a 3-D Animation and Modeling degree in the University of Hertfordshire, where she has been experimenting within the 3-D world and the opportunities it provides to create new exciting assets, as well as improving her 2-D drawing skills. Her goal, other than creating a unique story and comic, is to be a part of the gaming or movie industry as an aspiring concept artist!

Visit Elpida’s page on Facebook to see more of her work!

Artist Profile: Flor Theodosiou

10/08/2017 by

Cyprus Comic Con welcomes Flor Theodosiou (aka By Trial and Error) to its Artists’ Alley!

Flor is 20 years old, born to a Romanian mother and a Cypriot father, and raised in Limassol. Her creative practice includes mainly illustrating at the moment, something which is evident in almost all of her most recent works, although when she first picked up a marker as an infant, her artistic vision was to become a fine artist, and scribble masterpieces all over her mother’s curtains.

Something that never really changed is her preference to work traditionally the majority of the time, but she feels that aspects of her drawing style are consistently influenced by digital artworks that she sees, such as her line-work and inking—she finds fluid linear styles and crisp designs the most rewarding and immersive to work with. For this reason, while she enjoys experimenting with different media and techniques in order to discover new effects that she can marry together, she often tends to lean more towards materials like markers, gel pens and predominantly ink, due to the continuity and cleanness of the lines when drawn using liquid. She says that ink can be a little unpredictable at times and has a mind of its own, but she truly believes that they have slowly forged a stubborn friendship that can turn accidental spills into something that looks almost intentional!

To see more of Flor’s illustrations, visit her Facebook page.

Furthermore, putting aside the experimental illustrations and video-game/movie inspired drawings, she enjoys narratives, fairy tales and storytelling. She likes symbolic and metaphorical themes or elements in life, and therefore likes to incorporate that in her own stories—sometimes in quite a hyperbolic and gibberish way that’s delivered in figurative techniques which appear very literal. In fact, she very often catches herself strategizing with her colour choices to carry the plot of whatever story she is trying to tell.

At the moment, Flor is working on completing her studies at a local college and getting an HND diploma in the Animation pathway. She has been accepted into a Classical Animation course in Vancouver, along with her partner, Fares Zoghlami, AKA Approtis- and is hoping to attend the course with him next year. Together with her partner, Flor is currently working on creating some art pieces for Comic Con, a combination of Superhero/ Fantasy themes, and they feel that it will be a learning experience to help each other with their art, as they are both proficient in different aspects of it, even though they primarily stick to inks. They had collaborated together on past pieces, but this will be the first time that it’ll be intended to look professional, and to be sold. They are also planning to create a short comic in the future, and hopefully a graphic novel at some point, of a short story they have been writing and illustrating.

Artist Profile: Fares Zoghlami

10/08/2017 by

CCC17 welcomes back talented illustrator Fares Zoghlami to its Artists’ Alley!

Fares is a 20-year-old artist, half Tunisian, half British and has been living in Cyprus for the last three years. He is 6’4 (the average height for most Video Game RPG Protagonists), yet still unable to reach the hoop while playing basketball. He is fluent in British, American and Australian English, and dabbles in a bit of his ancestor’s Arabic tongue. He claims to be an avid film buff and a huge fan of Sci-Fi, Ancient Gods, and the good old Rom-Coms, while he spends most of his free time watching any animation he can find, because he has a profound love and appreciation for the moving arts. One of his recent guilty pleasures has been watching every single DC-Animated film released so far, because who doesn’t love seeing Batman punch Superman multiple times?

He has been drawing since a very young age, with the help of his architect dad and because of his ever-present influence, he has adopted a unique appreciation towards incredibly detailed line work. Fares has been drawing semi-professionally for the last couple of years, working on covers, commissions and illustrations, and so far through all of that, he observes that his style hasn’t changed all that much, except that his technique and proficiency with the materials he uses has increased dramatically! His earlier works from last year were mainly focused on figures and compositional pieces, which at the time he found challenging, but now, it’s just a matter of carefully planning it out. Recently however, he discovered his love for perspective drawings and of scenic and urban visuals (following in his father’s footsteps), and has tried his best to adapt his personal style to fit the new technique, and so far, he is extremely thrilled in how it is turning out!

Visit Fares’ Facebook page for more samples of his illustrations!

Fares recently attended a foundation course in art during which he learnt a new digital techniques which he tried to apply in unison with his existing work in order to make it pop with colour, as he realises that his work sometimes tends to be flat and monochrome. After this Summer finishes, Fares and his partner have both been accepted into the Vancouver Film School’s Animation course, which will hopefully be a fantastic learning experience for both, aiding them on their journey to becoming professionals in the field of illustration and animation.

Having attended the last couple Cyprus Comic Cons as an artist, Fares says they were some of the best days of his artistic adventure, meeting new people and making friends, as well as getting critical input on his art from other attendees and visitors.