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