Mel Hunter was born in Oak Park, Illinois and grew up in the mid-west during the thirties. In 1953, Hunter landed his first paid job as an artist-illustrator recieving a generous salary at Northrop Aircraft. For nine months, he painted astronomically correct starry backgrounds for the Snark missile program during the day, and painted expeditions to Mars and other far off places out of his vast imagination by night. Sooner than later, enough of these nocturnal flights of artistic fancy were selling to the booming Science Fiction magazines of the period to form the basis for free-lance freedom. From that point on until August 1967, Mel Hunter turned hundreds of major science and technology related paintings for publications such as: Life, Newsweek, Time-Life Books, National Geographic, Encyclopedia Americana, North American Aviation, Douglas, Convair, USAF, NASA and many others.