My First Anime Convention: Belfast Anime & Gaming Con 2025

After exhibiting at Comic Con in Dublin earlier in the spring and summer, I was curious to try an event with more of a focus on anime culture. Belfast Anime & Gaming Con was my first proper anime convention and going into it, I wasn’t entirely sure how my work would fit.

Although my illustrations have always been influenced by anime, manga and Japanese visual culture, all of the characters I bring to events are my own original characters rather than fan art from established series. I wondered whether an audience of dedicated anime fans might be looking mainly for artwork connected to the particular shows, games and characters they already loved.

I was very pleasantly surprised.

There was a genuinely lovely response to my illustrations. It was interesting seeing people recognise the anime influence in the work while still connecting with characters they had never encountered before.

Experiences like this make me want to dive further into my original characters and the worlds around them. I’ve always enjoyed creating characters, but increasingly I’m interested in what happens when they begin to exist beyond a single illustration, developing their personalities, relationships, environments and stories and gradually building a larger world for them to inhabit.

Setting up in Belfast

We travelled up to Belfast on the Friday so I could get my Artist Alley stall set up before the convention opened the following morning.

I was staying at the Crowne Plaza, where the convention itself was being held, and there was something wonderfully civilised about finishing the set-up and knowing my hotel room was only an elevator ride away. I have to admit, I also really appreciate the ridiculously good showers you get in hotels!

Having everything ready the evening before meant I could get a proper night’s sleep and come down the next morning without the usual early-morning scramble of trying to make a stall look magical before the doors open.

Saturday morning, getting ready for the first day of Belfast Anime & Gaming Con.

I hadn’t made a huge amount of new work since Dublin Comic Con earlier that summer, but I did bring a few new experiments with me.

One of my favourites was a small collection of Decora-inspired cake trinket boxes. I started with wooden boxes and added prints of my illustrations to the lids. I then decorated around them with piped resin ‘whipped cream’, tiny bows, gems and other embellishments.

Once the whip had created a raised edge around the illustration, I used it as a little wall to contain a layer of UV resin poured over the print, adding glitter before curing it. The resin gave the artwork this lovely glossy finish that reminded me a little of the top of a jelly cake.

They became these wonderfully excessive little objects: colourful, sparkly and ridiculously sweet-looking.

They were a bit of an experiment, but exactly the sort of product development I enjoy: taking one of my illustrations off the page and figuring out how it might become an object in its own right.

A little walk around my Artist Alley stall before the convention opened.

Experiencing AnimeCon

Once the doors opened, I realised pretty quickly that AnimeLeague’s convention had quite a different atmosphere to Comic Con in Dublin.

Comic Con had felt enormous, with huge crowds, celebrity guests, elaborate displays and a very broad mixture of pop culture. AnimeCon was smaller and more intimate. There seemed to be a real sense that people were there to participate in the convention rather than simply walk around and shop.

There was a full programme running throughout the weekend alongside the Artist Alley and vendor stalls. There were anime screenings, gaming tournaments, tabletop games, performances, quizzes, cosplay masquerades and karaoke.

People weren't necessarily just passing through the hall. I recognised many of the same people over both days, with attendees staying for the weekend, meeting friends, dressing up, playing games and taking part in things. From behind my stall I got to watch a steady parade of costumes and characters going past throughout the weekend, including some particularly entertaining inflatable ones.

That atmosphere was one of the things I enjoyed most about the convention.

It also made the response to my own work particularly encouraging. The people stopping at my stall clearly knew and loved anime, but that didn't mean everything had to be connected to an existing fandom. People responded to the characters, their expressions, clothes and little details in the illustrations.

For someone who spends so much time creating original work, that was really lovely.

Convention-goers browsing my stall in the Artist Alley.

Some of the wonderfully colourful characters who stopped by my stall over the weekend.

After the Artist Alley closed

One of the advantages of staying in the same hotel as the convention was that when the vendor hall closed for the evening, we weren't immediately faced with packing up and travelling somewhere else.

We could simply go downstairs, have dinner at the hotel and then wander back to the event afterwards to see what was happening.

One evening we went to watch the karaoke, which was an experience in itself. There is something particularly jolly about watching people enthusiastically singing while dressed in full cosplay.

It was nice to experience that side of a convention too. When I'm exhibiting at an event I inevitably spend most of my time behind my own stall, so I don't always get to see very much of what is happening elsewhere. Because everything was happening within the hotel, it felt easier to dip in and out of things once the selling part of the day was finished.

It made the weekend feel like more than simply travelling somewhere to run a stall.

Con-book! A little moment of excitement finding MyfanwyNia’s Studio listed in the con programme

The practical side of trading in Belfast

There were, however, a few practical complications that I hadn't really encountered at events in Ireland.

The biggest was currency.

Because the convention was in Northern Ireland, I needed to be able to take payments in sterling. My normal SumUp account is set up in euro and I discovered that I couldn't simply switch the currency on my existing account for the weekend.

In the end, my sister, who has a UK bank account, set up a separate SumUp account that I could use. I then had to figure out how to reset my card reader and temporarily connect it to her account.

It all worked, but it was considerably more complicated than simply arriving at an event in Ireland and switching on my usual card reader.

Then there was the cost of the weekend itself.

Staying at the hotel was genuinely lovely and made the convention much more enjoyable, but once the accommodation, dinner and breakfast were added together, the hotel cost came to almost £1,000 for the weekend.

Sales were good, so I certainly didn't come away feeling that the event had been unsuccessful. But there is a difference between having good sales and an event making enough financial sense to repeat once all of the costs, travel and logistics are taken into account.

When I looked at everything together, I decided not to return the following year.

What I learned from my first AnimeCon

Not every event I decide not to repeat has been a bad event.

Belfast Anime & Gaming Con was actually a really enjoyable weekend and I'm glad I went. I got to experience a convention that was quite different from the larger Comic Con environment, meet an audience I hadn't exhibited to before and see my work in a setting where I wasn't entirely sure beforehand how it would be received.

And perhaps most importantly, I came away feeling more confident about my original characters.

Events are strange little testing grounds for artwork. You spend so much time alone with characters in the studio that it can be difficult to know how somebody encountering them for the first time will respond.

Then you put them on a stall and suddenly someone stops.

They pick up a print. They notice a particular character. They laugh at an expression or point out a detail. Sometimes they tell you what the character reminds them of, or simply decide that this one is their favourite.

Those encounters make the characters feel a little more real.

Increasingly I find myself thinking about who these characters are outside the edges of the illustration. Where do they live? Who are their friends? What happens to them when I'm not drawing them?

I suppose that is how worldbuilding begins. Not necessarily by sitting down and deciding to invent an entire universe, but by returning to the same characters again and again until a world gradually starts growing around them.

So although Belfast Anime & Gaming Con isn't one I'm planning to return to next year, I'm very glad it became part of the story. I've since heard about a new AnimeCon coming to the RDS in Dublin in October 2026, so I'm hoping to apply for that one and see where it takes me next.