An entry for a contest over on Deviant, to support the work of the photographer Steve Perry (known as Arachnid15, or the Spider on dA, hence the spider theme), whose work had come in for a lot of unwarranted flack simply for having the full frontal male nude. The rules of the contest were simply to use one of his stock images featuring the man himself.

Having browsed both his deviant and personal websites, I was really grabbed not only by the amazing work he does, but also by the man, who put so much of himself into every shot he took. The title is both ironic and not at the same time, beauty being not in the eye of the beholder, but for me, in the eye of the subject.

All done from scratch in PS, with everything that can be seen on the original photo (found here: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/26413495/ ) obviously referenced, everything else was off the top of the head, aside from looking at a few pictures of spiderwebs.

Some closeups: