How the image for Hurricane Diane was made

painting framed by lush grape leaves and a glass of spilled wine: the lower half of a woman's face sensually eating grapes that are hanging from the vine

by Justene Merriman

November 15, 2024

First, a conversation with the Director

I met with the Director to discuss what the play is about, and more specifically what her take is on the play. We talked about what aspects of the play she wants to emphasize, and what style and symbolism would work best to convey those aspects. We also reviewed some images she liked from her Vision Board. I asked her what she liked about each one, so that I could put something together which fits this play better.

A few points from my notes:

Very sensual without being sexual. Favorite example: a (copyrighted) photo of a woman sensually eating grapes. There were also mentions of Art Nouveau styling for the richness and luxury it exemplifies, however we didn't think using that style was quite fitting for the era and setting in which this play takes place.
Greek-ish in that the character looks goddess-like, but modern (no togas).
Lots and lots of lush green foliage. Examples: photos and paintings of thick jungles and forests.
Somewhat mysterious, specifically having foliage cover part of the face.
Luxurious. Reminiscent of renaissance paintings that depict people lounging casually next to a feast in the woods.
A little hint of metaphorical wildness, craziness, or menace. We decided a tipped over wine glass spilling wine was right for this.

A search for something that works

Working with limited time, I searched for images that could work. I had no luck finding any that combined the subjects we had discussed. I moved on to searching for images that I could piece together to work. It was surprisingly difficult to find a workable image of a woman eating grapes that satisfied the image we were thinking of, and more surprisingly difficult to find the right image (considering perspective, shape, and editability) of spilled wine where the glass is tipped on its side. I considered setting up and taking my own photos, but I did not have the resources do that without missing deadlines on other projects. I finally found one good wine glass image in Adobe Stock. I then turned to Adobe Firefly to generate a base image that I could work from in the way that a sculptor sometimes uses a framework like a skeleton to build off of.

Woman eating grapes

Adobe Firefly was more disappointing than expected in the attempt to create a single satisfactory image for editing, so I worked to generate imagery that I could pull apart and put together differently. I got one. Winning prompt, retried several times: "sensually eating red grapes in the jungle".

In Photoshop, I adjusted the lighting, shading and color (focused on enhancing warmth and sensuality). I added posterization, brush stroke and oil painting filters using layers with transparency effects. I removed 2 arms, a 6 fingered hand and a 3 (or 4?) fingered hand, a shoulder and part of the chest. I filled in those empty spaces with more foliage. I then created a missing section of the chin where a finger once was, and made subtle edits to other body parts - for example, the inside of her mouth was green! I also added several layers of foliage on top and applied the same effects to those. Below is the original image from Adobe Firefly, without editing.

AI generated photo of a woman sensually eating grapes, surrounded by lush greenery. She has six fingers on one hand, and three fingers on the other.

Putting it together

Next I edited out as much of the background as I could from the spilled wine glass photo (original photo shown below).

clear wine glass, tipped on its side, with wine spilling out, on a white surface with white background

In InDesign where I was working on the poster layout for the play, I placed the edited image of the woman eating grapes, with carefully selected cropping. Over that I placed the cut out image of the spilled wine glass, and added a few more copies of it over the top with transparency effects. I also added some shading behind it to vaguely represent a glass table so that the perspective didn't look out of place. The image you see was exported from the InDesign file without the poster text on top. In some cases, I moved the wine glass and applied cropping to fit the formatting of where the image is used. Throughout the process of designing the poster, I worked with the Director until she was happy with it. Her input vastly improved the image when I struggled to identify why I wasn't satisfied with it yet. I truly enjoyed working with her.