Hi, my name is Andreas Krapf, I am 28 years old and live in a small village near Würzburg (Bavaria). This past March I finished my communication design studies and have been working as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer since.

I get my inspiration from just about everywhere. That could be work from other artists, films, books, music, experiences, thoughts etc. There are simply way too many artists whose work I admire. A while back it was fantasykünstler, and h.r.giger, frank frazetta or luis royo. These days I really like tim biskup, gary baseman, jeremyville and dave cooper, to name a few.

I started out drawing and doing water colours when I was a kid. Later I tried out a few other techniques like acrylics, airbrush etc. For the last 10 years or so, I have been mainly working on the computer with photoshop and illustrator, whereas the clean visuals and the handling of vectors in illustrator have recently become my passion. Sometimes the clean look of vectors starts to annoy me and painting by hand is a welcome change. At the moment I am giving acrylic painting on canvas a try again and am having a great time with that :

I discovered the vinyl toy scene about a year ago and I have since started to model my own little figures. There is a ton of work you have to do before you get the original model formed from the polymer clay, after ordering the multiple steel forms, pouring the polymer into the hollow cast by hand, mixing the different paints and finally airbrushing the figure ;) But in the end it’s a cool feeling to have the finished figure standing there before you (check out the images from bronco&lue, pecker, lesley).

A very new project is my small label named denada, where I am working together with my friend marco to get t-shirts, toys, posters etc. out to the world. “denada” comes from the two Spanish words “de nada”, which translates to “you’re welcome”. The idea behind this project is our donation idea, as a part of our proceeds will go into small projects which we would like to bring to life..

At the moment I am trying out a lot of different things, discovering a lot and am having a whole lot of fun at the same time! (You can see a few things in my flickr.

What I find cool about laFraise is that, compared to a lot of other contest sites, you have a relatively large amount of leeway when it comes to what you design. By that, I am talking about the tolerance and openness to “bold” designs with “bold” statements and the openness to typographically heavy designs. Another thing: laFraise doesn’t just pay for the idea behind a design, but also for the impact of the shirt. In the end, in my opinion, it’s simple put the most importance on a shirt looking good. A couple of your competitors in the contest sector could learn a little from that. The laFraise style fits me well and I don’t have to bend myself much and that is a good thing ;-).

A point of criticism is that there are too few possibilities for the community. Communication between the users is rather complicated, and for my taste it’s a little too impersonal.  What I also find a little unfortunate is the language barrier for non-French speaking users like me ;). Most of the communication takes place in the French-speaking area and you really have to put a lot of effort in with the different online translators to follow what is being translated there ;)

Greetings from the countryside,
Andy

Selection by Akrapf :

Tourist by GUS

Me myself and my ghetto blaster by mon’ry

Air balloon by ndikol

Regarde moi by mikef