Where I'm at on my Daredevil project

I've reached my last couple of steps for my Daredevil work just before I get on with my paintings. I plan to produce 3 oil paintings on A2 Boards with some collage incorporated into it. My choice for this is because from known experience, the colour range I want is best achieved through oil colours, I also think Board would be more appropriate than canvas because board can take more force than canvas can so I can scratch into the work after. I may also use some water soluble oil pastels in my pieces because I used them in my development and they worked really well.

I created plenty of concepts of how to create my Daredevil using my research into sports wear and here are my drawings.

Head designs:
Using the boxing helmets I looked at I designed 5 helmet/mask styles.

Torso designs:
Using the chest armour I looked into, I created these torso concepts

 Hands:
Using the fighting gloves I researched I produced these designs

Legs:
I produced these two designs based from the shin pads I looked at

 Looking through my combination of designs, I assembled a few concepts of how my final costumes would look.

After creating this design I was happy with the result so I didn't create any alternative red suits, but used this design as a basis for the yellow suit

I like this design for the yellow suit, but it's not too different from the red one, so I made the decision to add boxing shorts later on. The reason for this is because in the comics, Daredevil wears the superhero style underwear on the outside, so I adapted this.

This suit is the pre-daredevil suit based on the Frank Miller book 'The Man Without Fear'. The design isn't much different to how John Romita Jr drew, except my design uses the boxing gloves from my research rather than just black gloves.

This is my chosen yellow suit, the shorts are an adaptation on the superhero costume Daredevil wears with the underwear on the outside. My adaption changes this to boxing short, it's splits the colours better and also looks more boxing themed.

This was a quick concept to see if the pre-dd costume would look better as a hoody. I decided against this because the original mask design for pre-dd looks better.

 Using my 3 choices I created 3 concepts on a posed model to see how it would look in action shots.

Pre-Daredevil

Yellow Suit

Red Suit

I also created 2 oil pastel drawings working from some profile photographs of the model I was using as an experiment of how he would look in the costume I designed.

I really liked using these watersoluble oil pastels and I may use them in my final paintings to make them mixed media pieces. 

This process took a long time to complete but with all these resources I now have my design ready and all that was left was compositions. I talked to my friend who is an illustrator who gave me some

 help with creating compositions for my work to fit them into my 70's research. Here are 5 ideas I came up with

Group scene working from a 70s new york photograph

working from famous photograph of Mohammed Ali

Working from both the Etan Patz disappearance as well as a Daredevil graphic novel where a child is kidnapped, tying the two together.

Here is a boxing themed image of daredevil throwing an uppercut knocking a thug towards the viewer

Here is a manipulation of another 70s new york photograph where Daredevil is stopping two looters.

Working from these designs, I then had to take location photographs as I've mentioned on a few occasions using Accrington as my interpretation of Hell's Kitchen based on how I grew up in the area. Here are these photographs

This factory is just down the road from where I live and growing up I often played along this street with my friends. A lot of these locations reflect on my childhood but mainly the dark times, for example a friend of mine was threatened with a pen knife along this street.

This area is quite significant to me, growing up there was a field on the other side of this wall, so a run up would be required to climb over it and climb trees on the other side. The dark side to this place is as me and my friends would visit here often growing up, we'd occasionally come across broken bottles, syringes and on one occasion a bullet.

This location is known commonly around my area as 'The Black Path'  notorious for crime. Whether it's just local legend that was spread around the kids like myself growing up around there, The Black Path was or is the most dangerous route around my area. From experience me and some friends had a petrol bomb thrown our direction along this path and ask anyone local to the area and they'll have their own horror stories of this path.

This location for my photograph is significant because growing up I almost fell from this bridge during a foolish tree climbing escapade. I won't be trying that again.

What I like about this photo is that there is just a couch left outside, resembling the rubbish left in the streets of 70s new york

This doesn't fit too much into my work for either 70s New York or boxing themes, but this building was really nice for a photograph

To reflect on the themes of 70s new york, I chose to photograph Accrington's Adult Book Shop for that seedy kind of vibe

With my locations complete, my next step of photographs were my model. My model owns a studio in Darwen where he's building a boxing gym there so he drove me and James Taggerty there to photograph him. After some quick sparring, we got on with photographing reflecting on his own boxing training and my composition designs.

From my photographs these were my best selection, I then used these photos along with my townscape photographs to create compositions using a photo editing software called GIMP.

Here is a video of this development

Here are those photographs

Reflecting on the disappearance of Etan Patz along with Frank Miller's graphic novel "The Man Without Fear" linking the two

Reflecting on boxing imagery as well as 70s new york

I really like the pose for this photograph and wanted to use both this and the background building in some way, so I created this image similar to the cover the #1 of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns

This image uses similarities to a famous photograph of Mohammed Ali as well as linking to the 70s new york theme

These two images reflect on a photograph from 1970s new york. The two variations both work but I can't decide which works better.

I'm not sure which 3 compositions to work from yet, so that's my next step to work on