Reading the Material - Detritus

 In our lecture this week with Jason, we looked at what material is and the stuff around us. The project we had to take away with us was the word "Detritus." Make a A4 poster that illustrates detritus of the city, look around us for inspirations, at the pavements and gutters. What is hidden within plain sight? 

Not ever hearing of this word detritus was interesting, and talking about the materials around us and how things can be wasted and/or used made me think that the word must mean waste or something along those lines. So before I started the project I had a look at various online dictionaries to find out any and all means of the word. Here is what I found and took note of: 







DETRITUS - (Dee-try-tus)

Latin origins from the word "Deterere" - To lessen, wear away.

*Waste or debris of any kind
* Disintegrated or eroded matter
* Loose Material/Disintegrated Materials
* In Geological Science - Loose mass of stones - Worn away from rocks
* In Biology - The organic debris formed from the decay of organisms
* Dead organisms/faecal materiel
* Debris, Junk, Rubble, Dust, Rubbish, Trash, Scrap, Stuff

From this, I then took photos of things that fit the meanings, anything that looked old and ruined. 

 Photos taken by me from Western Mill Cemetery/Baby Garden, View from my living room at night, View from the Plymouth Eye and Tree near Estover/Leigham by ASDA. 










I really wanted to make a poster that mixed both the photos and drawings for this project, so I first started editing the photos I wanted so that they could be used with any drawings I did. Any edits were mostly simple such as adding a noise filter or changing the contrast/brightness. I then searched for a interesting and different text to use for the poster as I also wanted to add a heading with the word incorporated into it. I then found the font Witching Hour by Anthony Robinson on Dafont.net that I used for a heading overlapping the cemetery photo. I picked this as I thought it made the most eye catching header out of the all the images. The text used underneath was called Black Chancery by Doug Miles, also found from Dafont.net. The image on its own looked interesting to me, almost like a death metal band cover or something. 

I ended up drawing the lamppost picture (at start of post) as I thought it would be a challenge for me as I never usually draw these kind of things. I ended up going over the pencil outlines in fineliner to make it that much bolder. I then coloured the piece with watercolour paints. I found this quite difficult but I did like the effects I managed to get. 

The final poster had an over all noise filter on top of other edits to make the images look all together. The drawing also had some brightness and saturation edits to make it a bit more like the photos. When the images were placed as I wanted them, I then made a version with and without text including the definition of the word Detritus. I think I prefer the poster without the text as I felt the text ended up getting in the way too much and making one panel seem too crowed, which ultimately doesn't fit in as a whole with the others. However, it was interesting to see what it looked like. The text had been copied and pasted underneath the black text with white so that it would stand out from the photo, although I added a glow effect as without it the text was still fairly unreadable.