Saturday, August 3, 2013

The History of BUILT by tallsteve

When I was about 13 or 14 I fell in lust with some bodybuilder that I saw in the back of a boxing magazine.  I didn't know why I liked looking at him, but I did.  Maybe because I was a really tall and skinny kid, I liked bodybuilders. Shortly after that, I bought my first copy of Muscle and Fitness.  One day I noticed that one of the cutest bodybuilders had a thick waist.  If I used a magic marker I could make his waist look much smaller.  Well I did, and his waist did. 

 Well, the genie was out of the bottle.  Every bodybuilding magazine that I now purchased was marked up with markers and colored pencils.  Then I got my first computer and an elementary photoshop program.  (Thanks mom and dad!)  I was off to the races.  There was only a handful of guys doing anything similar at the time, so I was mostly on my own.  I just kept on trying new things until the image looked good to me.  Sometimes I went overboard, sometimes I didn't do enough.  But I kept trying.

One day I discovered a website called the Evolution Forum, Muscle Growth. org.  Oh my god, there were other men doing the same thing I was!  They were learning too!  They were posting their morphs and drawings of muscle men.  It was a revelation.  Well, before I could post anything, I had to find a picture hosting site.  Photobucket was the one I chose.  I stored a couple of my best pictures, then posted them on the forum for people to comment on. My collection of pictures quickly grew. Everybody was so kind and enthusiastic.  After about a year, I noticed that I could look at the statistics on Photobucket.  Oh my 
god, there were 50,000 downloads.  My work was kinda popular! 

 Then, one day I went to Photobucket and all my pictures were gone!  I was banned.  No explanation, no reason.  Maybe my work was too sexy.  Maybe copyright stuff.  We will never know.  I was crushed.  That was a lot of art. Gone.  The joy was gone.  I still did morphs for my own enjoyment, but I didn't post very much.  

Until one day, some guy sent me a msg asking about my work (thank you JeffXeno).  He had copies of everything that I had posted on Photobucket! Would I mind if he posted them on his page on Flickr?  Mind?  Go for it!  Then he offered to help me set up a blog.  I didn't know what I was getting into,  but I said yes.  

For the first several months I would send him the pictures, and then he would post them on the blog.  I was actually afraid to post them myself!  He was so sweet and helped me step by step.  Finally, in July of 2012, I took my heart in my hand I started posting images by myself.  Then I made a masthead.  Then I reorganized the blog until I liked the way it looked.

The first month I had 8000 pageviews.  Mostly guys from the Forum.  Then I started posting on a few other sites and my pageviews grew and grew.  Last month I had over 53,000 unique pageviews. Not bad for the first year!

I have many ideas for the future.  "Build-A-Hunk"  "Pictures That Talk"  "Undress Your Favorite Model" and many more.    I look forward to continuing to improve.  I want to take a "Drawing the Human Body" class.  I want to learn HTML.  There is so much to do.  So much to learn.  The future look very bright, indeed. 

Your Pal,
Steve