Karen Connolly Frank Armitage (5 September 1924 – 4 January 2016) was an Australian-born American painter and muralist, known for painting the backgrounds of several classic animated Disney films, designing areas of and painting murals for Walt Disney World and Tokyo DisneySea, and his biomedical visualization artwork.

[1] After serving for his allotted time in the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II, he attended art school.

[2] He then quit art school and sailed to Canada, where he worked in Montreal for 18 months to earn enough money to get to Mexico City by bus.

Armitage then transitioned to painting backgrounds for other Disney films, such as Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book,[1] and the Disneyland episode "Man in Space.

[5] Armitage made the production illustration and Academy Award-winning set designs for the 1966 sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage.

[7] On October 6, 1989,[8] Armitage was given the opportunity to paint a picture of the Dalai Lama while the latter was in a meeting with six neurologists about life after death.

[1] In 2006, he donated a large portion of his medical artwork to the Biomedical Visualization Graduate Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.