On the third anniversary of Area Orion, here's a little backstory on how it came to be.
I've always been a fan of women with extreme curves like female bodybuilders and well-endowed movie stars & models. Muscles or boobs, I liked things big.

I discovered female muscle morphs on sites like
Diana The Valkyrie and attempted my first one around 1995. It was a crude enhancement of Ursula Teply on par with some I had seen online. There was a certain thrill while making it, like I was a mad scientist generating massive growth and giving these women ultimate power. After it was done I simply deleted it.
Over the next decade I would regularly check out my favorite female bodybuilding and fan sites.
WPW.net first then
The Valkyrie and others looking for the latest FBB images, artwork and stories. If one stood out I would morph it and maybe try a new technique, but the end result was always the same. It was deleted.
A few things changed in 2008. That Summer I bought a 17" MacBook Pro for home, instead of my usual PC desktop. A platform I was much more comfortable creating in. The laptop has always been the core of everything Area Orion, and still is.
I discovered
DeviantArt (DA) in late September 2008 (thanks to
DCMatthews) and a new world opened up. I never liked pay sites and here was an online community where hundreds of artists shared their female muscle artwork for free. All the pieces seemed to click and thought maybe it was time to start contributing.
I wasn't the first person to create a muscle morph but with years of practice I was making them extremely real looking. One problem always remained with mine or anyone else's - pixel distortion. Enlarging digital muscles & breasts larger makes them look fuzzy and the tell-tale sign of a fake. It didn't bother me before, but if I was going to show my work I wanted to solve this problem. The solution was simple. Instead of making muscles & boobs bigger, make everything else smaller (
see my tutorial). I tested this simple technique and was amazed at the result. I was ready to enter the online community.
What would I call myself?
Ben's Morphs sounded lame and most of my favorite morphers used kitschy descriptions like
Kash's Colossal Competitors or
Maverick's Musclebound Maidens. I wanted something different. What if there was a place where these marvelous women were transformed, like Area 51, the Twilight Zone and Frankenstein's lab all rolled into one? It seemed to add an air of mystery and I could take it in different directions like X-Files, where you really never knew what was going on.
By the time I was done, I had a name and much more. The premise for a real-time online science fiction/female muscle soap opera called
Area Orion.