Name: Lorne Lanning
Current Company: Oddworld Inhabitants
Best-Known Works Include: Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath
All-Time Favorites: Asteroids, Warcraft II, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus (and, of course, Stranger's Wrath)
Now Playing: Shadow of the Colossus

Name: Shuhei Kurose
Current Company: Namco
Best-Known Works Include: Me & My Katamari
All-Time Favorites: The Tower of Druaga series, by Namco. You could say these games changed my life.
Now Playing: Ace Combat 5

Name: Levi M. Hopkins
Current Company: ArenaNet
Best-Known Works Include: Guild Wars, Guild Wars: Factions
All-Time Favorites: Myth II: Soulblighter, Desert Combat
Now Playing: Guild Wars, Desert Combat, Geometry Wars

Name: Yoshizumi Hori
Current Company: Capcom
Best-Known Works Include: Dino Crisis 2, Resident Evil, Resident Evil 4
All-Time Favorites: Xevious
Now Playing: None

Name: Naoki Katakai
Current Company: Clover Studio
Best-Known Works Include: Biohazard (GC) (aka Resident Evil)
All-Time Favorites: The first Tomb Raider
Now Playing: Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy)

Name: Lee Dotson
Current Company: Flagship Studios
Best-Known Works Include: Anachronox, Alice, Unreal Championship 2
All-Time Favorites: Doom, Star Control 2, Disgaea, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Final Fantasy VII
Now Playing: World of Warcraft, Diablo II

Artists in video games start off just like any other type of artist: they learn about color, composition, and famous paintings in stuffy old museums. Then, somewhere along the way, a love of art meets a love of technology, games, or animation, and a new type of artist is born.

There are many different kinds of game artists and many different ways for them to express their art in video games. We sat down with six video game artists who've worked on interesting-looking and beautiful recent games to try to find out what makes them tick. We asked them how they got to be where they are, what their interests are, and about some helpful tips they might be able to provide for any aspiring video game artists out there.

Though comparing the artistic style of any two of these games might be like comparing Marvel comics to a Monet, these game artists do have several things in common: a passion for their profession, a good sense of composition, and the knowhow to pull it all together for a video game.

Maybe you've asked yourself whether video games are art or not, so this feature story might help you answer to your question for yourself. At the very least, most of us can agree that games contain artistic elements; that there are special brands of artfulness and skill that video game artists use in their craft--arguably just as much skill and execution as any other artists in any other medium need to succeed.

After you're done reading this piece, don't forget to take a look at our previous feature story, "So You Wanna Be A: Game Designer," discuss what you read here in the feature story forum, and stay tuned for future editions of "So You Want to Be A:" right here on GameSpot for more insight into what it takes to develop games.