Photoshop Artist Craig Mullins
August 24, 2006 10:30 AM   Subscribe

Craig Mullins is a commercial photoshop artist & videogame fan. In the mid 90s, after a couple amateur pieces of fan art he created for the game Marathon made their way to the folks at Bungie, he was hired to create a series of Halo themed art for the company. His full portfolio of commercial & personal work is interesting.
posted by jonson (14 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Huh, neat find, thanks jonson. I life his style, it has a neat feel to it that makes it a bit different than most stuff like this I come across.
posted by Stunt at 10:41 AM on August 24, 2006


Yeah, he seems to have a blend of painterly effects & photoshop based "photorealism"; his subjects tend to be too often either sci-fi or 16th century citizens & soldiers for my taste, but seeing the Halo (and Marathon) stuff illustrated was fun.
posted by jonson at 10:46 AM on August 24, 2006


Ah, Marathon... so many hours of my life were spent playing that game in its various iterations!
posted by clevershark at 11:21 AM on August 24, 2006


He really has retained a beautiful, painterly quality to a lot of these works... much of that can seem to gets lost in the digital transition and the ability to strive for technical perfection. You really don't see a lot of Marathon fans anymore, let alone one dedicated enough to produce some wonderful conceptual artwork. His story reminds me much of Dhabih Eng, who started getting commercial work after some fantastic Quake 2 fan pieces got him a lot of attention. He now works for Valve. Thanks for the post, jonson.
posted by prostyle at 11:22 AM on August 24, 2006


Craig Mullins does some fantastic stuff... and keep in mind that he was cranking out some of the Marathon stuff back in 1994/95.
posted by anthill at 11:23 AM on August 24, 2006


I'm sorry that there isn't a Master Cheif waiting by a pay phone picture.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 1:17 PM on August 24, 2006


Mullins is a god in our business. We all want to be that good, but he's just waaaaaaaaay out in front.

*sigh*... Back to detailing mechs.
posted by zoogleplex at 1:32 PM on August 24, 2006


I'm totally confused by his technique. Is he basically rendering 3-d constructions?
posted by DenOfSizer at 4:11 PM on August 24, 2006


No, I believe he's drawing from scratch, entirely on the computer, a la Bert Monroy, using a Wacom tablet and natural media tools to get the hand drawn effects.
posted by jonson at 4:24 PM on August 24, 2006


There are a LOT of talented artists out there doing some great stuff. Many of them do concept art for films and/or videogames. Check out the artwork of Feng Zhu, George Hull, Ryan Church, and Dylan Cole.
posted by cleverevans at 4:50 PM on August 24, 2006


Awesome stuff. Owes a bit to the great John Berkey, but without all the messy clean up.
posted by Bron at 8:33 PM on August 24, 2006


The Marathon trilogy still remain among my favourite games of all time. :)
posted by VirtualWolf at 12:20 AM on August 25, 2006


Yeah, prostyle, years ago I used to hang out on Dhabib Eng's digital art forums, as did Mr. Mullins (as far as I recall). Lost interest in 'the scene', so imagine my surprise when I saw Mr. Eng's name (and voice) pop up in the commentary for Half-Life 2: Episode One...
posted by slimepuppy at 4:47 AM on August 25, 2006


"No, I believe he's drawing from scratch, entirely on the computer, a la Bert Monroy, using a Wacom tablet and natural media tools to get the hand drawn effects."

Not entirely true - Mullins does use a 3D program (I think Maya) to lay out basic structural blocking for scenes that feature complex architectural forms, for work like matte-painting that needs to be super-accurate. If you find his Final Fantasy movie mattes on the site you'll see examples of it.

But for him, that's just to make it go faster, really. He's perfectly capable of laying that stuff out accurately without the 3D app. As are most of us concept types, except we're not all really fast at it. You can learn some of how at Scott Robertson's site.

For most of his other stuff, yeah he just paints it. He's just monstrously talented and experienced, top of the heap.

Disclosure: I'm a working concept artist and student of Feng Zhu... and I'm struggling to get that good. :)

For more great stuff, see my post in the Ralph McQuarrie thread.

Speaking of which, one of my colleagues who works for Lucas just got to visit the archives and see Ralph and Joe Johnston's originals.... drool!!!
posted by zoogleplex at 5:21 PM on August 25, 2006


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