Continuing today's theme of recreating Daredevil's armour pieces, this update covers his wrist guards and hand armour. Since they all use the same crafting techniques and paint job, I built these alongside my shoulder armour, so if all goes to plan the blog update for those will go live at the same time as this one!
After looking closely at screenshots from the show, I realised that Daredevil's wrist guards were a lot more detailed than I originally realised! The base layer was super simple: just a layer of craft foam cut into a trapezoid shape so that when it's wrapped around my wrist, one end will be slightly narrower than the other.
For the layered details on the narrow end of the gauntlets, I used cereal box card (adding some structural strength to the otherwise flimsy craft foam.) The details on the opposite end of the gauntlets were recreated with more craft foam, which is more of less the same thickness as the 4 layers of card. Finally, I glued everything together with tacky glue and "etched" the detail lines into the foam with a pencil.
Next, the glove armour! The first thing I did was make some cardboard templates for the back of the hand, to really nail the shapes and proportions.
I then transferred my finished templates onto craft foam and glued the 3 layers together, before etching the detail lines with a pencil.
I made a quick model of the knuckles in Google SketchUp and imported it into Pepakura Designer so that I could "unfold" it into a series of 2D templates to be assembled from craft foam.
I then filled each knuckle with hot glue to make them completely solid, before attaching to the back of the hand!
And finally, I made the finger armour from more craft foam. Each one is the same size - with the exception of the pinkies which are 5mm smaller.
To prep all of the armour for painting, I sealed the foam with my heat gun and gently curved each piece into its final shape. Then, I painted everything with the same mixture of "Bordeaux red" and black glossy acrylics that I used for the shoulder armour.
(Even painted with regular acrylic paints, all of the pieces are still very flexible without cracking and don't restrict my movements in the suit whatsoever.)
I have some leather gloves that the hand armour will be mounted onto, but they require some slight modifications first so I'll cover this in a separate update.
To finish the wrist armour, I originally planned on adding some Velcro and calling it a day. After looking more closely at my reference images, however, I realised that the two ends of the gauntlet don't meet and instead appear to be connected by black fabric. The only conclusion I could draw from this is that they must be connected with spandex and are designed to be slipped on and off of the wrist. I'm actually pretty happy with this revelation as Velcro has a tendency to bend and crack foam when you pull it open.
So, I cut out a rectangle of spandex and attached each end to the inside of the gauntlets with hot glue.
Overall, I'm extremely happy with how these turned out. If I was being super picky, I might say that the foam on the gauntlets needs to wrap around my wrists a little more but I've always been my own worst critic (and I'm too lazy to remake them so it's something I'll learn to live with 😜)
All that's left to do now are the smaller details on the suit (like the various hex nuts, the piping on the vest, etc.) and the billy clubs. The end of this build is definitely in sight!!
Thanks for looking! 😉
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