13 is a hardbound handmade book and one of the most intense, precious, and valuable creations of my life so far. The title works on several levels. It refers to 2013, the year in which the whole project began, but also to the age of 13, the moment in which I became Bla23R. Even the cover holds that origin inside it, because it can be read as 1 and 3, but also as a B. So the book begins exactly where my identity as an artist began.

The starting point was simple only in appearance: the goal was to illustrate one page from any story by the Brothers Grimm. But almost immediately I pushed that limit away and charged myself with something much bigger: to illustrate the whole story. The story I chose was The Brave Little Tailor. Before even entering the tale, though, I had to solve the hardest problem: finding the style. At that time, I had always drawn through the languages I already knew best, comics, manga, and graffiti. So the challenge became how to mix those worlds and pull out something that could feel truly mine.

The whole book is made of 123 pages of art, and it can be divided into five chapters.

1. The finding of the style
This first chapter is about searching for a visual language that did not yet fully exist in my hands. To get there, I had to stop overthinking. The more I used my brain in a controlled and rational way, the more I felt trapped by things I thought I already knew, by images that seemed already done, already inherited, already closed. So I tried to switch that part off. In that phase, I also took different drugs, especially LSD, changa and D.M.T. because for me they altered perception, amplified the senses, and felt like they were shutting down certain parts of my brain enough to let reality bend. That mattered to the process, because I was trying to escape ordinary vision and access a more unstable, fluid, and personal way of seeing. It was not about decoration or excess, but about breaking the limits of the image I thought I knew how to make.

2. The study of the characters and of the story
Once the style started to emerge, I had to look at The Brave Little Tailor through my own eyes. That meant studying the characters, the atmosphere, and the deeper structure of the story, not just as illustration material, but as a world I had to reinterpret. In this phase, I was building my own relationship with the tale, deciding how the figures should live, mutate, and speak through my language.

3. The story itself
This chapter is the heart of the book in narrative terms: the visual unfolding of The Brave Little Tailor. Here the project becomes what it first promised to be, but in expanded form. It is not just adaptation, but transformation. The Grimm story passes through my hand, my symbolism, and my visual instincts, becoming at once literary source and personal myth.

4. Three years of drawings
This section opens wider and gathers the artistic overflow of that period. Across three years, I filled the book not only with material connected to the main story, but also with studies of some of my favorite comic characters, drawings of my own characters from a still-unpublished comic and world that I believe will one day be something epic, illustrations born from trips, visions, and other fragments of my imagination. In this sense, the book becomes much more than one project. It becomes a living archive of a whole phase of becoming.

5. Preparation for Entropy
The last chapter leads toward what may have been one of the most complicated installations I ever conceived: Entropy. This project imagined a real koi fish swimming and, through its movement, generating from chaos one of my drawings on a website. That idea, balancing randomness and authorship, natural motion and digital image, became another extension of the same obsession that runs through the book: how form emerges from disorder, how language can be found inside chaos, and how creation can happen through forces larger than direct control.

That is why 13 is not just a book, but an origin object. It holds the moment in which I stopped being only someone who drew and started becoming the artist I was going to be. It is about style, identity, obsession, study, narrative, overflow, and installation. It is the place where Bla23R begins to recognize itself.