© 2014 – Edward Draijer – EGD Fotografie
It doesn’t really matter what website you’re visiting; whenever there is a contest, the organizer will always say that choosing a winner was the hardest thing ever. Very standard, but absolutely true. We held a cosplay contest this month to bring a new type of audience with us, and everyone looked great. We received amazing photos and personal statements from cosplayers that definitely deserve a Facebook like or two, like Achetarin, Kalseru, G4G and the very badass Kialna. However, we said to only bring along two of the participants.
According to Wendalin, Jeroen and Jeroen, the four best entries we received are from Kai the Hipsterfish, Saya, Merel (also known as Draxaca, and Lady Heca since a few weeks) and Kittycricri. Although we hope to bring her along some other time, since we absolutely loved the photos and letter she submitted, Saya didn’t make our top 3. But be sure to check out Saya Costumes on Facebook. Three left, and we couldn’t quite bring that down to two people. At first we chose Merel and Kai to be our winners, but after that we decided we really wanted to bring along Kittycricri as well.
Let’s start with our wild card, Kittycricri. Kittycricri is a Belgian cosplayer with a very difficult nickname (haha). She is 25 years old and started cosplaying when she turned 16. Since she’s a very experienced cosplayer, she walked around in quite a lot of cool costumes. Let’s name some: Ayane from Dead or Alive, Nurse Joy from Pokémon, Felicia from Darkstalkers and my personal favourite: Helena from Rayman. She entered our contest with some fancy DOTA 2 cosplays and with Major Mutoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. Writing us with quite some enthusiasm, she named four reasons why she wants to join us: her little obsession for DOTA and anything related to it, to meet some amazing people she knows in real life, cosplay (although the last few years were a bit quiet for her, let’s change that Kitty!) and “IT’S A GAMING EVENT!! I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT IT!!!”. She absolutely deserves to win, so especially for her we have three winners instead of two.
Our mutual first choice is an experienced cosplayer as well. Kai the Hipsterfish (Facebook: Envoysoldier) writes that she would love to get the chance to go to DreamHack to get onto such a big podium to show off her work to a large audience. She especially loves League of Legends and the big titles by Blizzard. Her recent Diablo III Barbarian shows that she pays quite some attention to all of the important details. The armor and weapons that she makes for her various cosplay costumes is the reason she stands out so much. Her Freljord Ashe and Leona from League of Legends are amazing, as well as her Zelda cosplay (big fan here). It’s not a big surprise that her costumes look so great, since both gaming and cosplaying takes up to several hours of almost every day. “One of my more recent cosplays that I really love is my Diablo III barbarian. It’s a great excuse to go wild and act totally different from what I normally do and I got to put a lot of details into the costume.”
© 2014 – Edward Draijer – EGD Fotografie
Not as experienced as the two ladies above, but Merel/Draxaca(/Lady Heca) has something really special. She started in 2013 with a very happy Vi from League of Legends. A few weeks ago she cosplayed as Hecarim from League of Legends. I think that was the first (and hopefully last) time ever that I asked a girl to put a helmet on to look better, but she looked very badass. Although you can see in some way that she’s still fairly new to building her own costumes, we want to support her by inviting her to Intel Pack4DreamHack as well. She shows that she is very creative and she places almost every piece of progress online for all of you to see. She says she’s a bit of the nerdy type and that she loves putting her creativity to good use, so she decided to combine those things. At the moment she is busy designing her Worgen Death Knight Tier 8.5 from World of Warcraft. The photo below shows her Hecarim outfit, but we’ll make sure to show you some cool Worgen photos later on. Get to know her right now by liking her Facebook page at Draxaca Cosplay!
We’re very excited to bring some cosplayers with us to the event. Let’s hope they’re just as amazing in DreamHack’s cosplay competition as we think they are!
