It was 1994, when I was discharged from yet another hospital stay, that I bought my first modem with a staggering speed of 28.8K.
There were no 'evil' sites like Facebook that stripped you of all your personal information and sold it to the highest, equally evil, bidder. There was only the Internet and the first pioneers who ventured a little further into it.
It was a time when you had to tell your fellow housemates that they couldn't make any phone calls (we had no mobile phones back then), for the next 30 minutes because someone was emailing you a 3 MB file.
Around that time, while I was slowly searching for comic book characters, I found an image that changed my life. It was a highly
compressed picture of a model dressed as the Queen of the Night: Vampirella. With my Photoshop 2.5 skills, I decided to clean up
the image and send it back to the website where I had downloaded it (without my then annoyingly large logo).
But instead of emailing it back to the original website, it somehow ended up at a completely different address. After some back and forth emailing, the recipient of the Vampirella image asked me if I had a website and if not, he (DAI News) would be happy to host one for me. And so, after a few failed attempts, 4F was born.
In 1998 while my work as an airbrush retouch & illustrator ran (due to my health), somewhat into the ground, I noticed that the 4F website had seen over 1 million visitors. I was like, 'why not try and see if that can help me pay some bills' and started at the end of 1998 a (very modestly charged) membership site.
During the years I stayed true to my cause; creating and displaying fantastic, fantasy images of beautiful women in shiny, tight outfits. I do my best to keep it classy & 'in good taste'.
If you go through the available files or already have done so, you will notice that there are some nice images among them, but also some (cough) that are quite rough.
I have been trying to express that last one for years as 'growing up and developing a "better" vision of my work and that of others, but that doesn't quite cover it.
Then one day, while I was working on (yet another) revamp of the 4F website, I did some quick research to make sure I was giving the right artist credit for some of the inspiration and came across this quote:
Leaving it at that, I really hope you enjoy your stay and come back often, hopefully to find more new, exciting images to please your eyes and soul.
-
Rick (4)F. van Koert.
Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
There were no 'evil' sites like Facebook that stripped you of all your personal information and sold it to the highest, equally evil, bidder. There was only the Internet and the first pioneers who ventured a little further into it.
It was a time when you had to tell your fellow housemates that they couldn't make any phone calls (we had no mobile phones back then), for the next 30 minutes because someone was emailing you a 3 MB file.
Around that time, while I was slowly searching for comic book characters, I found an image that changed my life. It was a highly
compressed picture of a model dressed as the Queen of the Night: Vampirella. With my Photoshop 2.5 skills, I decided to clean up
the image and send it back to the website where I had downloaded it (without my then annoyingly large logo).
But instead of emailing it back to the original website, it somehow ended up at a completely different address. After some back and forth emailing, the recipient of the Vampirella image asked me if I had a website and if not, he (DAI News) would be happy to host one for me. And so, after a few failed attempts, 4F was born.
In 1998 while my work as an airbrush retouch & illustrator ran (due to my health), somewhat into the ground, I noticed that the 4F website had seen over 1 million visitors. I was like, 'why not try and see if that can help me pay some bills' and started at the end of 1998 a (very modestly charged) membership site.
During the years I stayed true to my cause; creating and displaying fantastic, fantasy images of beautiful women in shiny, tight outfits. I do my best to keep it classy & 'in good taste'.
If you go through the available files or already have done so, you will notice that there are some nice images among them, but also some (cough) that are quite rough.
I have been trying to express that last one for years as 'growing up and developing a "better" vision of my work and that of others, but that doesn't quite cover it.
Then one day, while I was working on (yet another) revamp of the 4F website, I did some quick research to make sure I was giving the right artist credit for some of the inspiration and came across this quote:
Sometimes I wonder if we ever really improve as artists or if the nirvana derived from completing a piece blinds us enough
to love what we have created and move on to the next piece. If we could see the work as it is, with years of reflection in the here and
now, how many images would end up in the trash rather than on the racks?" - Jim Lee.
Leaving it at that, I really hope you enjoy your stay and come back often, hopefully to find more new, exciting images to please your eyes and soul.
-
Rick (4)F. van Koert.
Rotterdam, the Netherlands.