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Andreani Soupashi


Andreani Soupashi is returning back for Cyprus Comic Con 2019 Artists’ Alley!

Andreani is a Cyprus-born freelance artist, currently living in the UK. She grew up with a pencil in her hand, drawing whatever interested her at any given moment, mostly horses and cartoons. At the age of four, she enrolled in art classes where she was taught the basic disciplines of drawing, painting and sketching. These classes lasted for eight years and helped spark her passion for design, illustration and comics. In elementary and high school, she took small design jobs such as creating posters and illustrations for various school events and selling artwork for charity.

She also designed costumes, props and sets for school plays. Her lifetime dream is to become a video game designer and she set this dream in motion while working for her GCSE exams. For her projects, she delved into character design, scriptwriting, concept art and animation, getting a taste of the industry in the process. During this time, she taught herself several programs including Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects and ZBrush. Her art style evolved, transforming from colour to atmospheric greyscale, but her passion for painting fantasy creatures and fierce warriors never wavered. At this point in time, Andreani is in her third year of her Computer Science degree, spending long hours on her dissertation and assignments. In the sparse time she has for drawing, she focuses on improving her work, discovering new techniques and tackling challenges that will help make her a better artist.

To see more of Andreani’s concept art, visit her website.


Heba Rena Yassin


We are pleased to welcome back illustrator Heba Rena Yassin to our Artists’ Alley!

Heba was born in Sutton, UK and grew up in sunny Limassol, Cyprus. She has been participating in the Cyprus Comic Con Artists Alley ever since the first one, in 2014! She studied BA Fine Art at the University of Hertfordshire and later graduated with an MA in Digital Art and Design at the University of Nicosia, where she further developed her passion for digital art. Subsequently, Heba moved back to London to start her life and career.

She loves cats, ball jointed dolls, Japanese food and bubble tea! Her work is very much influenced by Japanese art and culture. She has always been interested in Character Design, Narrative and Illustration. She enjoys creating her own comics, character designs and illustrations based on her own or other people’s stories. Heba’s aim is to convey important and powerful messages through her work, relevant to the world we live in. She says that the most rewarding thing for her is managing to convey emotions to the viewer. She truly believes that ‘‘Progress is the consequence of internal conflict’’. The harder we work the more we progress, and the better our work becomes. For Heba, art is a very rewarding and enjoyable field of work, despite the difficulties and competition faced.

Visit Heba’s page on DeviantArt for more images of her work.

Currently she is very much interested in Japanese fashion. In her spare time, she likes to make her own jewelry inspired by J-fashion and has launched a little online shop, ‘FairyCakez’, where she sell her creations. She recently worked as a volunteer at London Craft Week 2017, which was an invaluable experience for her, as she got to see work by different creators and help out at the event as well. In 2015, Heba worked as a character designer and comic page creator for Tag2 Team Studios, while in 2016, she created a short comic entitled ‘SAM’, pubished by WriteCY, a creative writing joint, in collaboration with a writer, for ‘The Comic Book Project’. She has worked as an artist assistant to artist Christopher Christou during her studies in 2013. Her duties included canvas repair, mould making and casting.

Furthermore, she also participated at Malta Comic Con 2015, and Limassol Art Festival 2015. She has self-published a comic entitled ‘KOKORO’ inspired by Japanese anime and manga in 2016 and wrote an article for Bibliophilia magazine, ‘Mapping of Galleries in Limassol’ in 2014. She feels honoured and blessed to be part of Cyprus Comic Con and hopes to continue to be a part of it in the future as well.

Arinela Kociko


Our next Featured Artist is young illustrator Arinela Kociko!

Arinela is currently studying History & Philosophy of Science at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She loved painting from an early age and in the last couple of years, she began experimenting with creating comics. She attended freehand drawing lessons as well comic book design seminars at Ornerakis School of Arts and subsequently joined their 3-year comic book program as of this year. In the past, she had taken part in two group art exhibitions in Athens.  More recently, she participated in the group comic book exhibition “Όπου και να ταξιδέψω η Ελλάδα με πληγώνει” (“Everywhere I go, Greece hurts me”), having as inspiration the famous verse of George Seferis’ poem, “Με τον τρόπο του Γ.Σ” (“In G.S.’ way”).

Make sure to visit Arinela’s profile on DeviantArt!

Special Guest: Maul Cosplay


We are proud to announce Maul Cosplay from Germany as one of our Cosplay Special Guests for Cyprus Comic Con 2019!

Ben, aka Maul Cosplay initially started cosplaying as a hobby while he was working as a film stuntman. After 10 years of cosplaying, Ben decided to become a professional cosplay promoter. Some of his well-known projects include: Geralt of Rivia from CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher, Soldier 76 from Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch and Snake from Konami’s Metal Gear Solid.

You can follow Maul Cosplay on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Ben has created his own costume and stunt promotion company named Defcon Unlimited, where he produces his cosplays, props and photo-spots on a high-quality level for video game promotion. Ben’s main focus is keeping his character as authentic as possible which is why even the smallest details are crucial to him. One example is when he travelled to the exclusion zone of Chernobyl to find the right atmosphere and mood for his cosplay of Joel from The Last of Us in 2017.

As one of the most talented stage combat fighters of Europe, Ben has also gained some attention through his performance as Darth Maul in a fan-made YouTube film called Darth Maul Apprentice which you can watch below.

 

Although Ben chooses characters with badass attitudes, he prefers to be within the crowd during conventions, talk to fans and followers and he tries to spend as much time as possible with everyone around him.

Last but not least, Ben loves Disney songs 😉


Maul will be available for meet and greet at his booth in the special guest area. His lectures, workshops and activities during CCC19 will be announced in the near future.

Introducing: Evistoria Games


Following our last post, we want to introduce the second game development studio, ‘Evistoria Games’, that will accompany us at the Athens Game Festival on 20th-21st of October 2018 at the Helexpo Maroussi exhibition.

Evistoria Games is an indie game development studio which was founded in 2017 in Nicosia, Cyprus. Evistoria Games’ founders are passionate gamers themselves who sought to share their love of story-telling games through engaging worlds with other people, whilst also promoting local talent and their various projects. The Evistoria Games team is currently working on the development of two different games.

The first one is called ‘You Shall Not Break’ and it’s a clicker game where the main objective is to heal the tiles by clicking on them and prevent them from breaking. As you earn more points you, get to unlock new awesome helpful items and you get to play through four different environments. ‘You Shall Not Break’ is set to be released in Fall 2018 and it will be available on Steam as well as on iOS and Android devices. You can try out the game and win one of the 20 weekend passes that the Secretariat General for Media & Communications of Greece has donated! Just visit our booth at the ‘Up to You(th) Festival’ on the 29th of September, where Evistoria Games will be accompanying us and give ‘You Shall Not Break’ a go!

Check the trailer for ‘You Shall Not Break’!

Their second game is called ‘Yenefan’, a single-player action-adventure RPG, where you can take control of the four characters – Larvi, Taslar, Melliora and Delphic – each with unique abilities, to fight against a variety of enemies in order to find the Four Elemental Crystals that have fallen onto the world of Yenefan. ‘Yenefan’, which is a larger scale project than YSNB, is planned to be released initially on Steam but it will become available for consoles on a later date.

If you want to find out more about Evistoria Games and their amazing projects, check out the links below!

Website: http://www.evistoriagames.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/evistoria/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/evistoriagames

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evistoriagames/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/evistoria-games/