Raleigh Iron Works is a sprawling new development, built on the site where The Peden Steel Company operated in the 1950s and forged the bones for our city’s skyline. James M. Peden renamed the company from its original name, which was Raleigh Iron Works, after taking over the bankrupt steel division in 1931 and relocating the company from its original downtown location to the site on which its legacy sits today. The original Raleigh Iron Works produced munitions during World War I, and during World War II, Peden Steel fabricated barges for the War Department. I-beams stamped with the ‘Peden Steel’ logo form the skeletal structure of many of Raleigh’s most recognizable historic buildings.
The new development, developed by Jamestown LP (responsible for Atlanta’s Ponce City Market) and Grubb Ventures (developers of Dock 1053,) takes design inspiration from the original company, preserving many of the original beams and structures as decorative centerpieces. Overall, it’s a very cool structure; I’m excited to see it come to life and am happy to have had the opportunity to contribute some of my work to the development.
This mural project has been a groundbreaking effort for me on multiple levels. It is the most complicated design I have implemented to date, the first of my designs to incorporate text, my most advanced use of photorealism, and among the first designs I developed with the help of Midjourney AI. I will use this post to show you what went on under the hood from development to completion.
The Benefits of AI as a Tool
There are myriad complaints and reservations amongst artists about what threats AI could pose to livelihood. Many artists scoff that AI-generated art is not “real art,” and, OK, I can understand some of the reservations, but I am a stand for AI having the potential to offer benefits to artists willing to integrate it into their creative process. The important thing is to know where, when, and how to implement it, and of course, not to over rely on any one tool, lest it become a crutch.
In my case, I can compare having access to and basic knowledge of Midjourney to just a year or so prior, when I would scour Google Images and Adobe Stock for reference images, or snap poor quality reference images of my own using my iPhone camera or my Olympus Pen mirrorless camera, which I very much enjoy but never really learned how to use properly. One of my weaknesses as an artist is that my finished product is only as good as my reference. This being the case, if I strengthen my reference to better match my idea, I can greatly improve the quality of the finished product. At the end of the day, the finished product is what matters. Could I simply “get better” at painting from imagination? Sure, I suppose so. But I am a working artist with a very full schedule, and my primary concern in the meantime is turning out the best quality work possible. For that, I will explore every available tool.
Mural Development
I originally pitched the idea for the parking deck on the Atlantic Avenue side of the development, which ultimately (and, if I’m honest, mercifully) went to Gabe Eng-Goetz. I reformatted the design to fit a 15’ x 40’ facade facing the back entrance of the building and overlooking a swimming pool.
It is a bit of a learning curve to get used to Midjourney. You have to create a Discord account and then become a paid subscriber in order to interact with the Midjourney Bot on your own dedicated server. If you are a free subscriber, you can experiment with Midjourney in public channels, but it’s very noisy. Remember AOL chat rooms?
Some of my earliest efforts were done just by blindly inputting text into Midjourney version 4 (“v4”). I spent a lot of time reading into others’ work and prompts, and experimenting with language to generate a specific result. It took a while to start getting the results I wanted; I used keywords like “World War 2 era” and “1940s” and kept getting rather drab, gray images. The real inspiration for the concept came from the bright Kodachrome photographs of that era, so that’s the kind of look I really wanted to achieve.
I went on a days-long bender experimenting with text prompts, generating new images, and blending multiple images together to try and achieve my result. What I really had trouble achieving was any kind of nuanced facial expression. Midjourney is great at generating expressionless faces, but for a public facing mural, expressionless faces tend to be disconcerting.
The Mural Design
The phrase “Over a Century of Progress” came from ad copy I found in the N&O Archives. The client became attached to the phrase, and I had to keep it in. One of the bigger challenges with this composition involved having to reconcile what I thought was best for the piece with what the client wanted: all of the original elements from the parking deck design—the female figure, the construction motif, and the written phrase— smooshed into a 15’ x 40’ canvas, a portion of which was obscured with windows.
Then there was the steel beam construction. I took grainy, black-and-white photos from the N&O archives and fed them into Midjourney as a reference.
I played with these for a while because I wanted to make the I-beams more of an abstract element so that they would fit in better with my painting style—because another thing I can not accomplish for the life of me is three-point perspective. I did this by blending multiple source images together. (Do this by prompting "/blend” and then you can upload up to five images.) After some time and hundreds of generated images, I had my basic building blocks.
Constructing the Image
I almost always work directly on top of a photo of the wall; that way, I always have an idea of the surrounding context while I’m working. This takes the guesswork out so that when I eventually superimpose it later, I can be sure there are no unpleasant surprises. After that, it’s basically a collage process: image placement, layer masking, and painting back in with the brush tool. I’ll go more in-depth into this process in a later tutorial.
Here is a screenshot of all the layers visible in the final image.
Overall, the hardest part of this process was tempering my impulse to keep going with content generation. With so many possibilities at my fingertips, I felt like I could have done literally anything. How many more tweaks would it take to generate the perfect image? I had thousands of images already, and each of them inspired me in their own way. I had to discard hundreds of images in service to the success of the overall design. At the end of the day, the objective is always to consider what will be most impactful in the space, limit your options, and do what’s best for the artwork.
The Install
The install process was about as straightforward as any other mural—drawing up a loose grid (I really half-assed this part) then superimposing my image over the grid in photoshop and using that image as a guide to put up the outlines. The one thing I was nervous about was whether or not I would be able to accomplish the text, because it’s so precise. However, I got over my apprehension when I realized I could just treat the text like any other drawn element, and however “uneven” it looked would be part of its character.
I just used some pieces of crown molding I pulled out of the scrap pile at Home Depot as a straight edge and followed the bricks to get it basically aligned.
From there, it was about following the design outline and doing my best approximation of the colors. This is not as difficult as it seems. As long as the values read from far away, it’s a surprisingly simple task to be able to create the depth you need with only a few colors in your palette. If you are able to color match a few anchor points, everything else is relative.
Again, I think what made this process so smooth and relaxed was having such a strong reference that had me feeling inspired. I was deeply interested in capturing every color and value change because I could see it so clearly, and it removed all the stress of on-the-spot problem-solving out of the equation. It didn’t hurt that I had no one to bother me and a pool to dip my feet in on breaks.
At the end of the day, I can feel content that I’ve left Raleigh Iron Works with a vibrant mural that captures the spirit and resilience of the people who once toiled to lay the foundation upon which our city stands. Through the aesthetic language of this mural, we can celebrate the industry that once defined us and honor the individuals who laid the foundation for our modern city. The mural’s message encourages its viewers to remember those who came before us, cherish the progress we have made, and look forward with the same hopeful gaze towards the future.