fbpx
Menu Tickets

Elfia Haarzuilens 2025

12 & 13 april
21 January 2025

Dishycraft’s road to NCC

As most of you probably know, the winner of our recent Costume Parade in Arcen won the prize to participate in the Nordic Cosplay Championship (NCC). We are very curious about how this journey will go, so we decided to follow him and take you with us! Read below for part 1 of the story - who is Dishycrafts, how he'd prepared for Arcen's Costume Parade, if he was nervous and more!

Arcen 2024 Haarzuilens 2025

Hey there! My name is Evan, known as Dishycrafts, and I have the honour of being the first Dutch representative for the Nordic Cosplay Championships in Sweden! For years, many in the competing community have hoped the NCC would one day expand to the Netherlands, me included. So we were all very excited to learn Elfia would host the first NCC preliminary in 2024!

In 2022, I was attending Stockholm Comic Con, where I had the pleasure of judging the Swedish SM Contest, which is considered the first round of selections for the next Swedish Representatives for the NCC. The organiser of the NCC, Sam, extended me an invitation to visit Närcon one day, which I did last summer. I attended the event as a special guest to judge the Närcon Masters competition, and to give a lecture on foam textures. I needed some convincing from the new friends I had made during the event (and Manuel), because Elfia Arcen is quite far away from where I live, and I hadn’t arranged anything to attend the event. I have to travel by train, so going up and down for the day wouldn’t be feasible with the amount of make-up my costume needs. Luckily, two dear friends offered me a place to stay, and they accompanied me as my helpers. They even agreed to get up at 5 am that morning to do their own make-up and travel to Arcen as early as possible so I could make it to my pre-judging slot!

I have been visiting Elfia since 2017 and I had participated in the Elfia costume parade once before, in 2022 with my Jaskier costume. I was awarded the ‘Best Cosplay’ award. The last few years I’ve mainly attended Elfia Haarzuilens by volunteering at Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls stand. Arcen is my favourite location, but since it’s so far away, I don’t attend it as often as I wish I could.

I started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 in September 2023, and it didn’t take long for me to decide I wanted to cosplay Halsin. I was drawn to his kindness, his sincerity and wisdom. I started working on him in October, mainly starting with planning, patterning, and researching. He was initially going to be a side project, but the more planning I did for the costume, the more I decided to make him a competitive costume. I worked off and on this project for the next few months while I also worked on commissions, but spent most of April and May finishing him for Animecon for the Tournament of Champions preliminary. I didn’t place, but was given useful feedback to help me improve my costume. So after I returned from Närcon, I went to work straight away. From the feedback I had received, I was suggested to improve the leaves, which were plastic and bought online. I had experimented earlier that summer with making leather leaves, by making a 3D printed stamp and pressing it into some wettened leather to create an embossed effect.

I knew a few of my friends had signed up for the NCC preliminary as well, so I knew the competition would be a tough one as they are all super talented cosplayers. I try to have a mindset when competing of having zero expectations about winning anything, which means there won’t be any disappointment if you don’t. That way, you get to enjoy the competition a lot, and spend your time socialising with the other contestants backstage as well. During the award ceremony, my friends who I knew had also entered for the NCC, won an award in other categories, so the closer we got to the NCC announcement, the more nervous I did become, feeling I could have a chance of placing. Apart from my friends, I didn’t know who else had signed up, so the anticipation that it -could- be me, finally started to make me feel nervous! I started reciting my number in my head so I wouldn’t suddenly forget it when they announced the winning number, because I could see myself doing that! When my number was announced, I felt incredulous and emotional, because this was something I had prepared for for the last two months. I felt my act wasn’t that strong but I would have been happy with any prize, or hearing feedback to learn how to improve the costume even further. Even if I wouldn’t place, I’d had a great time with my friends and my fellow contestants, and I would be an experience richer no matter what the outcome would be.

I have to admit I didn’t really celebrate winning. I had to travel home the same evening, so after I did all my duties, I scrubbed the silicone off of my face and changed out of my costume. I wanted to thank my friends who had let me stay over, so I bought them a gift card. I just treated myself to a hamburger meal on the way home, haha!

I’m currently not nervous, since the Netherlands is an observer country and can’t win any award but the audience favourite. I have a cool act in mind, so I plan on focusing mainly on the performance. There is another Baldur’s Gate 3 character who I really wanted to cosplay, and I figured he would be amazing to perform with on the NCC stage. He is a Thespian character, with a lot of panache, great bad-guy monologues, and an eccentric manner. I’m talking of course about Raphael, arch-devil Duke of Cania.

My main struggle will be transport, so trying to figure out how to make a fully collapsible set of wings is what’s keeping me up at night! That’s why I’m tackling that part first, so I have a long time to figure it out and improve if needed.

I’m looking forward to returning to Närcon this summer, meeting the other international contestants, and seeing my Nordic friends again. This will be my second international finale, but there’s still a long time between now and then so this project will likely keep me busy for most of the year. But I’m super excited to bring Raphael to stage and maybe… strike a deal or two…

To be continued!

Follow Dishycrafts to follow him on his journey!