About the dude behind the 13
Hello! I'm Alex Konrad. I'm a freelance illustrator, graphic designer, surfer & human being. I am extremely passionate about design, drawing, illustration, punk rock & skateboarding. Oh, and I also fight against zombies in my spare time.
Currently based in a town called Constance in Southern Germany, I enjoy and love my work while never being satisfied with my own work. For illustrating awesome things my weapons of choise are pencils, a bunch of human brains, Photoshop, Illustrator and my vintage scanner. And the most important thing: my vivid imagination, of course. Inspired by travelling, surfing, cool movies, other artist & music like Sublime, I try my best to give my drawings a vibrant expression.
What about the 13?
Well, to cut a long story short: I was born on Friday, the 13th and I love horror movies. And it seems to me that the #13 is my lucky number somehow. At first when I started my business,
13 was served as a name for a fictitious skateboard brand, for which I created some designs to fill my portfolio. Well, my environment and I got accustomed with it soon.
If you have any further questions
or want to talk about something or even I can help you out with any of your projects – don't hesitate and
shoot me an email. I'm looking forward to hearing from you.
Alex
How got it started?
I was traveling through Spain together with my girlfriend and my buddy and we went surfing at Zarrautz. After a stoking session in the Atlantic ocean,
we’ve been looking for something to eat and passed by a surf shop. From a book in the window a blue, screamin’ hand catched my eye and I was spellbound. I recognized this graphic from
quite a number of t-shirts, but I didn’t know anything about its creator, Jim Phillips. So I dropped in pronto and leafed through this vibrant piece of paper.
That was the initiation. Highly inspired and motivated I created a portfolio and became self-employed.
Bang! That’s all, 13 Illustrations was born and my way as an illustrator was paved. This incident was the beginning at all.
The process
It depends on each project, but normally I still start the drawing process the old school analog way. That means scribbling some rough sketches on paper, abusing the rubber. Then making
a clean illustration, then coloring in Photoshop or Illustrator with the graphic tablet after scanning it. But I have to say that I'm overgoing to fasten up the work flow by sketching directly in Photoshop. You know why, there's
a Undo function, hell yeah!