Well all of you who have read the story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" or have seen the movie "Sleepy Hollow" know that the Headless Horseman's black steed was named Daredevil. I have been fascinated with this story for a few years now, and I'd like to consider myself an amateur artist. One day I came up with the idea to create a full-scale Headless Horseman atop his rearing charger, Daredevil.
It starts...
Did I think I'd actually get this done, did I think this could even BE done??? Well let's just say that when someone tells me that I can't do something, that only makes me try harder. (You know how parents are! "You can't do that! You'll make a mess of the basement! Blah blah blah!!") So, influenced by Bon Jovi's anthem, "It's My Life," I started construction on the head of the horse down in my basement computer room as a cry of rebellion. BWHAHAHA!!
The first materials I used to form this were two frisbees for cheeks, a piece of styrofoam to sandwich between them, and a water bottle and an empty can of Cherry Coke to show position of the head. I eventually had to buy as many as six rolls of masking tape to 'sculpt' his head with newspaper. I even cut up pieces of cardboard to create cheekbones. When I got to the eyes, I wanted to make them as real as possible, so I bought two Spalding rubber bouncy balls. I painted them bright red to resemble the Daredevil in the Sleepy Hollow movie poster. I also wanted to give this horse a fierce presence. I rolled up two long cone-shaped tubes from a roll of wrapping paper and made nostrils for him. Below are two pictures of the head in development.. the grey Breyer model horse is Embajador XI, an Andalusian breed. I used this as a model because this is about the type of horse they used for the movie.
After summer was coming to a close and school started back in, I told my art teacher about my project. She was kind enough to let me bring in my big horse head.. which was nearing larger than realistic proportions. I hauled him in my trunk in a black trash bag... kinda reminiscent of the "Godfather" movies. By this time I had put the other eyeball in, along with a vein on each side of his face. I used two straws for that little detail. Here is a picture of him now in the art room (where he would be spending a very long time!) before I put on his ears...
After I got his ears on, I had my dad build a triangular type support out of two by fours to construct the neck.. he didn't know what he was making, I only told him it was for 'art.' Did I forget to mention my parents had forbid me to make this thing when I told them my brilliant idea in the first place?! Anyway, after I stuck his head on the neck, I quickly filled around it with newspaper, balloons and other packing material to give it some open space inside. He actually got a little too fat for his own good. To make him more stable, I paper macheed paper grocery sack over the areas I had completed. He started to take definite form, now...
I decided after careful surveying of the size of his head and neck already... ther was no way I was going to be able to make the ENTIRE horse and get it out of the room. I simplified the project and designed Daredevil to be mounted on a wall, to look as if he were jumping through it. I could paint a mural around him and it would make a nice effect! I did surgery on Daredevil's immense neck, cutting a bunch of paper out of him and patching him up with duct tape and the glue and sheets. I made two huge legs next, one curled and the other one extended. Here is a picture of my friend Angie modelling the extended leg, covered with torn bedsheets. I covered the horse's head and neck in these bedsheets and used slightly-watered down Elmer's glue to make it tough.
I had no choice but to tell my dad about this project after I reached this point. I had to make a great armature that would hold him up and so after he rolled his eyes and sighed he actually helped me design and make a structure out of boards. He came to school with me one night and built it on my teacher's book case. (She is SOO patient, don'tcha think??!)
Right after he helped me by providing the wooden base, we stuck the legs on the supports. By now, I realized just how HEAVY Daredevil was really going to be.. so I blame this part on Dad. :~D He gave me chicken wire to wrap around the horse's middle so we would not have to stuff him full of newspaper.
Next I filled in the horse's body with muscle structure. I built around the chicken wire with waded up newspaper and good ol' masking tape (my best friend throughout this project). I did this pieces at a time because I wanted to see some fast progress on this puppy.
It went pretty fast from there... I started working at cyberspeed and glued half of him up to his neck and then the other half. I had painted his head black already because I was sick of looking at that dumb pink flowery pattern, so that explains his odd appearance - LOL!
It took me a little while to finish gluing him, so I clocked in some after-school hours to accomplish this. After he was entirely covered with the gluey bedsheet strips, I let it dry and concentrated on how I was going to root his mane and finish painting the rest of him.
I took a straightened coat hanger and taped pieces of black witch's hair from a Halloween wig onto the wire in a row. I only worked with two of these black wigs, the latter I had to search for high and low during the Halloween off-season. The second wig was a donated piece from Mrs. Bennett who subbed the art class on ocassion. I mixed the wig pieces so the hair looked like it was from the same creature. Next I made incisions along the top of Daredevil's neck and hooked the coat hanger along the top and inside. I secured this with masking tape and ducttape and re-pasted along that. After this was done, I started slapping on the thick black acrylic paint all over the huge beast. I don't know if Mrs. Galvin is aware of this, but I actually used up 12 of her black paint tubes because I couldn't find the big bottle in the cabinet at first! :~[] (Sorry Mrs. Galvin!!!) After I found the big bottle, it went much faster to say the least.
I painted the hooves gray, in which I bought MYSELF. I wanted to add horseshoes to him, but they would have to be handmade because his feet are not perfectly molded.
I bought black silk fabric and fake doll eyelashes to add more detail to the horse's eyes. First I painted him a big black pupil and I left the iris red, creating a white ring around his eye. I later hotglued the silk and eyelashes together and above his eyeballs (Spalding rubber balls) to create eyelids and lashes.
One of the most tedious missions was repainting Daredevil's teeth and getting the inside of his mouth correct. I changed the color twice until it was a fleshy-pink color, and painted his protruding tongue first. I had to go back over his teeth with the white spray paint I'd first used on them. I did this by spraying in a styrafoam cup and then dabbing it out with an old paint brush and applying over the paint flaws.
Word spread like wildfire about the giant horse dwelling in the Middle School building across the way. There was the topic of getting him out of there, mostly stating he'd have to be a permanent tribute to the school, but I was not going to stand for that. Eventually, people's interested peaked, and that's when the news reporter came from the local newspaper, the Daily Union. Someone had suggested my art teacher call them, and so she did. A reporter came when Daredevil was soon to be rescued from the school and the reporter wrote up an article for the paper and took a picture that ended up a front page story.
However, the REAL story was finished when my big black horse torso was finally hung on the wall of my basement. How did we get this papier mache beast out of the middle school? My dad and his assistant, Jeff Nohren (a fellow classmate of mine) lifted Daredevil from his hook on Mrs. Galvin's bookcase and carried him to the door adjoining the art and music rooms. While Mrs. Galvin and I pulled on one side, and my dad and Jeff pushed on the other, the fat project was squeezed through the regular-sized door and pushed into the music room with the double doors. From there, it was a cakewalk. The two men heaved the surprisingly light creature through the doorway and across the backyard of the school, scraping through tree branches as they made their way to my dad's trailer. Yes, we were going to ride through town with a horse torso rearing out of the back of a rusted old trailer. Dear God, what a sight!
Jeff and I sat in the back of the trailer as we held the beast steady, leaving the art room behind forever. I'm sure if I'd inserted tear glands into my horses eyes, he would have been crying. (Ok lame joke.. anyway!) My dad drove his Ramcharger through the back roads until we hit the highway to home. We had to drive about 20 miles under the speed limit as to not throw the thing onto the road, which would not have been a pretty picture. A policeman happened to be following us the whole way, a curious ocassion, since we didn't call for a police escort, and when we pulled into the driveway, my mother discovered the reason for all the media hype.
Of course, mom knew all about the horse by this time. However she did not know what kind of beast this really was, even WITH the picture. My mom came outside, took one look at the titanic horse with the threatening legs kicking in the air, and said, "That thing is staying outside." Yeah, RIGHT! With the effort of everyone, we squeezed the horse through the front door and into the doorway heading to the basement... here was the tricky part. We ended up having to take the hinges off the door to be able to push the beast downstairs. During this, I had to stradle the horse and ended up making a slight indent on his underside. (This sounds very strange writing all the details, but it was such a crazy sight in person!) Basically, we had this half-horse held upside down as we finally shot it down the stairs with me guiding the head. Once downstairs, my dad placed a heavy-duty brace in the cement wall to hang the creature on, and Daredevil has been ruling the darkness of the basement ever since.