Concept artist Craig Mullins excels at creating dramatic, believable concept paintings for movies and games that are rich with digital “brushstrokes”, at times appearing as abstract blobs of color when viewed in detail.

Mullins was an early adapter of digital painting for concept art and is one if its undisputed masters. (He was urged to try digital painting by no less than John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at ILM and co-creator of Adobe Photoshop.) Mullins has created matte paintings for movies like The Matrix Revolutions, Armageddon, Apollo 13 and Forrest Gump; and concept visualization paintings for games like Halo 2, Marathon 2, Final Fantasy, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent and Prince of Persia.

His site galleries are filled with a dazzling array of images from his professional work. One thing that constantly stands out is his brilliant use of light and color to highlight portions of the images in a way that adds tremendous visual drama.

In addition to his concept art, he does digital sketches and works in traditional media: oil, watercolor and pastel (usually figures from life). He appears to work rapidly, both in his digital concept art and in his traditional life painting, which gives his work a feeling of immediacy and freshness.

The 39 year old Californian native attended Pitzer College in Claremont for two years before studying product design at the Art Center College of Design. Mullins soon found that he was better at drawing cars, which led to 6 months at Ford in Detroit. He also discovered that his design sense was a little too weird to be of value to the car design industry and returned to Art Center to study illustration, where he finally finished his degree in 1990.

Thanks to digital technology, he currently lives in Hawaii with his wife Jennifer and a young daughter.

Thanks to  Masters of concept Art and La Pulce Fumetti

read an Interview With legendary concept artist Craig Mullings on Halo official site