happy new year !! i finally started daredevil after saying i was gonna start it a year ago—i even had a fic in my drafts as i was slowly coming up with an idea for what i wanted to write but now i have two matt plots on my hands, one more religiously traumatic than the other bc my gay characters unfortunately cannot catch a break and that probably says more about me somewhat growing up with shows that wouldn't put queer relationships in a soft light and how those relationships equate to pain and angst and suffering and overall harshness but ANYWAY-

what i was rambling on about was the fact that i came up with a cool painterly comic-style cover (credit to bayports) that has a whole boat load of symbolism so i'm excited to get into it !! it's not so much a cover process as it is a walkthrough of the cover itself and what it represents down the line

now buckle in for a lesson in art history and religion you didn't ask for <33

satisfyingly, the manip itself is lovingly and sardonically titled "idle worship" (we'll get into that soon), but the fic is titled doomsday preppers/descansos, taken after the songs doomsday by lizzy mcalpine and descansos by hayley williams (DD, hehe). truth be told, i feel like i didn't put any work into any of this, it all kind of just fell into place in my lap a little bit ??? and then gears started turning and then i remembered what was left of my catholic school education and things started happening so !

starting with the image itself, we have the comic faceclaims, matt murdock as daredevil and nightwing as my oc, gabriel hernandez—the first name is intentional, given that gabriel is the name of one of the archangels. nightwing himself doesn't have a huge significance other than just being the comic faceclaim, he kinda just. . .stuck

iconography-wise, daredevil—albeit bigger—is kneeling, and gabriel stands upright as the archangel. this more or less depicts the essential part of their relationship. gabe doesn't really put matt on a pedestal but he does hold him in a slightly higher regard than most people, considers him an angel of sorts (when he was younger; he took the blinders off when he got older).

✷ designer's note: ngl, i got stoked finding that image of nightwing in front of the statue bc i realized i could erase the head of the eagle and make it look like gabe had wings, doubling down on the archangel reference. i def could've manipulated the statue a little more to make it look like the wings were protruding out of gabe's back but alas, he isn't an actual angel and the wings are lifeless. original pic below !

there's also a fun, hypocritical but also not really hypocritical detail about matt being depicted as daredevil yet having a halo behind his head (an actual halo you'd see in paintings, not the corny ones that hang above the head)(the devil was once an angel blah blah), and then it spreading out and turning into his radar sense (i keep wanting to call it his echolocation but the man isn't a fucking dolphin), a sort of double entendre meaning that matt's abilities make him saintly, angelic, coming full circle to gabriel describing how he felt about matt

with gabe standing yet being smaller than matt, he can still hold his own. there's a pair of stone wings behind him, representing the angelic value he holds to his name, gabriel joel (two of the archangels). they're both standing on ledge-like surfaces, so there's somewhat an even playing field, but gabe is still smaller than matt, and that could depict how he views himself in comparison to matt and that higher regard he holds him. coming back to matt kneeling and gabe standing, you could consider that matt's kneeling bc he feels some sort of unsuspecting pressure (or he's just as down bad for gabe as gabe is for matt) while gabe is standing and not really having anything holding him down. you could also say that the wings being stone could represent gabe's childlike innocence and religious upbringing dying off

as for the art terms, we have hierarchical proportion and chiaroscuro. hierarchical proportion is an art technique done, usually in painting or sculpture, when the artist draws figures at an unnaturally large scale to depict importance of the figure in the painting (matt being bigger than gabe). chiaroscuro, on the other hand, is another painting technique done when the artist depicts a stark contrast in light and dark in the paintings. it differs slightly from tenebrism because of the use of different shadows to create depth in the darkness as opposed to using straight black (the bright light near matt's head surrounded by the darkness). 

i think that brings us to the end of our art lesson ! i should do more of these lengthy observations, makes me realize i actually love talking lol

now back to planning and plotting bc i think i like that more than actually writing