Art is all around us. The packaging of the products we use everyday is art and often the products themselves (espcially if Apple products). The songs you hear on the radio are art (even the not so good ones...lol). The clothes on our backs, the acting on TV and yes, even the characters in the video games we play are all art. Think about it, someone has to dream these creatures up, sketch them out, give them life and then present them as part of a complete and often beautiful landscape. One of the best at doing this is the subject my artist profile today: Tetsuya Nomura. Peep his bio below courtesy of Wikipedia.

Tetsuya Nomura (野村 哲也 Nomura Tetsuya?) (born October 8, 1970) is a Japanese video game director and character designer working for Square Enix (formerly Square). He has been rated by the website Next Generation as the 7th most important and anticipated video game developer of 2007.[2]
Nomura was born in Kochi Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. When he was a young man, he worked at a vocational school creating art for advertisements.

In the early 1990s, Square hired him to work as monster designer for Final Fantasy V and then as graphic director and minor character designer for Final Fantasy VI.

Nomura did not gain recognition until 1995, when Square asked him to be the character designer for Final Fantasy VII to replace Yoshitaka Amano, the series' original character designer. It was a huge critical and commercial success and became the definitive role playing game for the PlayStation. In 1998, he worked on both Parasite Eve & Brave Fencer Musashi. In 1997, Nomura worked on 1999's Final Fantasy VIII, a game that achieved commercial success, where he returned as the character designer.

Afterwards, Nomura worked on several other different projects for Square Enix, ranging from character designing in Ehrgeiz for the PlayStation to complete designing and orchestration of "The World Ends With You" for the Nintendo DS. He continued on to design characters for Square's first PlayStation 2 game, The Bouncer, before returning to character designing for the Final Fantasy series with Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy XI, and "Final Fantasy XII". [3]. More recently, he has acted as the director, concept artist, and character designer for the Kingdom Hearts series, which currently includes the title game, the Game Boy Advance sequel Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, and the PlayStation 2 sequel Kingdom Hearts II.

Nomura directed the CGI animated film Final Fantasy VII Advent Children which was released on 2005 in Japan and in North America on April 25, 2006, and also wrote some of the lyrics that appear on the soundtrack. This was also Nomura's film debut, and he re-designed the characters as well.