Sasha

Picasso did one.

Gainsborough did one.

And so now I'm doing one.

The Blue Boy.

As you know, at HMBoys.com we're very keen to add value to your viewing pleasure.

So now we're offering you something quite special.

Art.

That's Art with a capital A.

After all, you can go dozens of other sites where they use a cheap camera, a setting that's clearly the crummiest, least expensive hotel room they could hire for 30 minutes - and a model half way en route from the addiction centre to the morgue and with a dick that's already got there.

But HMBoys.com, on the other hand, is where you'll find creativity, beauty, elegance - and, it goes without saying, fully operational (and fully tested!) dicks too.

So, in the great tradition of the Old Masters - who, as far as I can make out, were, as often as not, Old Queens - I present Sasha.

My own contribution to the Blue boy genre.

Now every great artist has to pose his model with the utmost care.

You probably think that, for us artists, the actual execution of the painting, sculpture, photography or whatever is the hardest bit.

But it's not.

It's something far simpler.

Getting the model's pose right.

Which is why, in the case of Sasha, I spent at least a couple of hours getting him to dress and undress and - with my expert hands-on help, of course - to find the best possible position to best display his physical attributes.

That means I needed to look at him closely from every possible angle…

….even if Sasha sometimes looked as though he was pretty uncomfortable.

But, having found a good pose, a new problem often then rears its head…

[No, not that head, stupid!]

I'm refering, of course, to the age-old problem of perspective and foreshortening.

That makes things that in reality are quite big actually seem quite small - because of the angle from which you're looking at them.

That optical phenomenon poses real difficulties for us artists.

Of course, in Sasha's case it required several more hours of detailed hands-on work before we could, in his case, properly resolve it.

Though, in the end, the answer turned out to be quite a simple one.

If an object's going to look rather small in a photograph, you have to compensate for that fact by doing your best to physically increase its size in real life before you take your shot.

So that, I'm afraid, is what I did.

Though I cannot, of course, confirm whether or not the same technique was used by Picasso or Gainsborough.