Illustrating a favorite hymn

 kw: photo essays, hymns, illustrations, ai art

I know many hymns. I usually have a hymn tune running through my head, which is why I am not to be found wearing earbuds. Certain hymns have such vivid imagery that I get a lovely scene in my mind's eye. I decided to illustrate one of these using the current version of Gemini Flash, which relies on Nano Banana 2 for image generation.

The first stanza and chorus of this hymn are:

Savior, lead me up the mountain,
  Where the Lord alone is seen,
Where we hear the voice from heaven,
  Where the air is pure and clean.

 

Lead me higher up the mountain,
  Give me fellowship with Thee;
In Thy light I see the fountain,
    And the blood it cleanses me.

I first asked Gemini how to properly format a prompt to produce an illustration for a poem or hymn. Following its suggestions I wrote a detailed prompt containing about 220 words. That yielded this image:

Then I began editing. I prompted Gemini to have the couple walking uphill. This was the result:

Now there is an uphill path, but the couple haven't started up it. So I asked for that:

Now we are getting somewhere. I could have requested them to be further up the path, but this is very good as it is. It's time for some finishing touches. 

At this point, the image size is 1376x768, Gemini's default for 16:9 aspect ratio (1.778:1). I make these images to run in a slide show on an HD screen (1920x1080), so the images need to be larger than that. I used the free program Upscayl to double the dimensions to 2752x1536. This is slightly wide, a ratio of 1.792:1. I like exact multiples of 32x18 for the slide show. All further work was done in IrfanView.

• I first resized to 2741x1530.
• I cropped a bit to achieve 2720x1530 (85 times 32x18), using a tool in Irfanview's Edit menu called Create Maximized Selection, picking 16:9 as the ratio to use.
• I added the text of the stanza and chorus, using drawing tools in IrfanView.

This is the final result:

For the file in my slide show, I added a signature; I sign with my name and date and the AI tool used, near a lower corner.

Note: You can click on the images to get the full size versions. The last image is 4 Mpx, midway between HD and 4k.