Rick 4F

Oh hi! :)

My name is Rick (4)F. van Koert.
I classify myself as an iIllustrator, sci-fi geek, (Steam) gamer (IF I can find the time) and lover of shiny dressed women (as if you didn't guessed that one.  :)

Where did it all start? I think when I watched a Dutch pop-program called 'Top-Pop', way back in the '80's and saw 'Vanity 6' in the studio performing 'nasty girls. Seeing an oiled up body, squirming in a shiny black leather & lace body. I was 16, what can you do, but try to act as if nothing special unfolded just before your eyes, in the presence of your parents and younger brother, who where watching this at the same time too! But in my head, fireworks went off! (my brains, yes?) 

I think I could have been saved"" if not that long after I watched Jane Fonda starring as 'Barbarella' do her 'thing'. Back then seeing Jane in her nylon bodystocking, covered by a transparent (again shiny) plastic harness, it was like a thermo-nuclear explosion went off in my head.

Boom!

Ever since I've been fascinated by women in Science Fiction, and if their their attire was thigh and shiny, you couldn't make me happier. :)

Tight, shiny and not to be toyed with, Erin Gray as Col. Wilma Dearing in spandex in 'Buck Rodgers'.

At some point I got my first computer. Both my parents worked at a large advertising agency and the studio there advised to get a Mac. Hence I'm now a "Mac-guy". Could have gone the other way but Mac's where for graphics so you got one if you wanted to try your hands on something called "Photoshop". Version 2.5, top of the line digital graphics, yeah! 

I remember my first drawing I made with it. It was a black haired girl in a tight, pink bodysuit with large black buttons on the front coming down from the left side of her body (a bit asymmetrical). Her legs where snugly fit in thigh-high boots, while she explored a sewer-system while a rat looked on. The rats eyes where 4 pixels large. Couldn't be larger as the Mac had a massive 2 MB (Megabyte) of RAM, upgradeable to a whopping 8, and a 100MB (Megabyte) hard disk. Of course it came with a floppy disk drive. 1.4MB was the biggest file I could store on those.

Needles to say I quickly outgrew my first Mac after I got the "taste" for more while learning Photoshop. -> 2.5!

It took a while to progress a bit and of course the rise of the internet, with a dial-in 14k4 modem. Which was really fun because when I was "internetting" nobody else could use the phone in the house, or receive any calls. Remember, 'mobile-phones' didn't exist, although we had brick sized walkie-talkies. :) I wrote "of course" because before the internet I was just doing this for myself. No-one to share it with, so only half the fun of doing.

At some point I was trying to find a common name for my images (some worse than others). And for a while I really liked the idea of "CyberMac Heroines". This one for example (+/-1996) is a combination of photo-bash, photoshop and a real banana on a scanner. Gosh, do those things turn quickly brown when you put them on one. It's also quite messy afterwards getting the screen clean again. So you could probably file that under 'bad idea's. But hey, I needed a banana and google was barely functional back then. Or was it even at all? I remember Netscape 2.0, up to 4 and then the big rewrite that never really happened and subsequently killed it. Google not so much. Somewhere I came up with 4F: The fantastic Fantasy & Fetish Females. Though since a year or 2 I swapped 'Fetish' for 'Futuristic'. It has a slightly nicer ring to it, and less dark-foreboding.

A good, fitting background is as important as what is in the foreground. Especially if you like the image to tell stories, or at least, trigger the fantasy of those viewing the image. For those backgrounds I've had a variety of 3D apps. Infini-3D probably was my first, but I never managed to get a hold on it. It just completely eluded me. Instead I went for something simpler called 'Bryce 3D'


The great thing about Bryce was that you could import other peoples meshes, and store them inside the application. It had a few totally weird sky settings and a cube, cone, sphere, derivatives of those a ground plane and a mountain, which you could either add together or perform a boolean operation on. That was it.
This here, from 22 years ago, shows one of the few not too bad Bryce 3D backgrounds and the booleans in action. A mountain where I subtracted a sphere from, put one back in plus a pyramid where I used flattened cubes to subtract from creating an 'apartment level' effect. Sort-off. Don't look too close, like I wrote before, this is old. :)

I remember trying Bryce 6, with was a nightmare with a new render engine that was utterly frustrating slow and then someone on the other side of the globe from Boylston, USA came to my rescue. First asking "how I managed not to make things burn". - Using the dodge and highlight tool in PS to ad shine will "burn" the colors beneath it, so you need to do a little bit more to repair the "damage" -. I told him how, we chatted a bit over time and then he introduced me to Cinema 4D, version 6.

Took me a long, long while to understand even the tiniest basics of it but when I ready to buy version 8, I could do more with it than I was ever able to do with Bryce. I'm still using it though I probably should try to figure out Blender which is much, much more friendlier on my wallet and isn't run by people who overnight turn the UI upside down and think that light grey on light grey is a good UI choice. (Bunch of frikk'n idiots!). But that takes time. Then again I'm not much of a mover. Only this year, I let go of Photoshop 5.0 (released in 1998!) and only because I was forced too, as my OS totally not supported it anymore. :( (The fights I had getting this version behave like I wanted it to... aimai!)

And I also still have a virtually unused zBrush here. I've kept it updated every year but I was/am never able to get started with it. As my work becomes more complex, the advanced idea's that I have probably need sculpting to come fully to 'life'. The thing is I have no idea where to start. I recently started with what I thought was a starters video but during step 4 or 5 I needed a "beam" shape kinda thing which was no-where to be found in the brush tools I have, so I stranded right there and just picked photoshop back up to start a new image.

At least I know a bit how that works. :)

Ps: if you are a model or photographer who doesn't mind sharing your work (images) with me, don't hesitate to contact me. Maybe there is something we can work out together.