Secret of Mana Painting | Game Art in My Style

Posted on December 21, 2025 by Jon Amdall Leave a comment

I recently painted the characters from the classic SNES game Secret of Mana – this was such a fun project, but definitely came with some challenges. The original game is one of my all-time favorites and triggers fond memories, particularly when it comes to the music. The game’s art featured a more cartoonish design though, so I had to try to adapt the characters to fit my oil painting style. I’m not really a realistic portrait artist, leaning more in the impressionist direction, but I do prefer a more grounded depiction over the animated look. So, painting this game art in my style was an interesting challenge that ended up being very enjoyable project to explore.

The oil painting was done on 12″ X 12″ oil paper and was my 270th overall. I’ll follow my standard format here, which is to share an image of the painting, the Instagram time lapse, and some verbiage specific to the piece. Then, I’ll embed the YouTube discussion video, including another brief writeup on the topic, materials used, and some other hopefully useful information. I’ll wrap the post up by sharing the YT Shorts time lapse and some other similar painting videos.

*Secret of Mana Characters, oil on paper.*

I’ll talk more about this painting of course, but first I thought I’d discuss art styles and provide some context on this game. I have a fantastic book called “The Art of Mana” with illustrations from the series. The book says the original artist responsible for the Secret of Mana’s visual style was Hiroo Isono, who had a distinctive and fantasy-world look to his artwork. You can definitely see the impact his style had on the game and its unique atmosphere. Beautiful landscapes and certainly iconic designs, but his cartoonish depictions of people don’t really fit as well with my approach. Another artist of note here is Terada Katsuya – he created some Secret of Mana illustrations for Nintendo Power magazine back when this game was released which were some of my favorites. Katsuya has a style that I really like, which exists somewhere in the stylized comic genre. It doesn’t exactly overlap with my style, but I do love his approach for these characters.

Although it’s the first time I’ve painted Secret of Mana fan art, I have done a couple of sketches in the past (January 2021 and February 2018). Honestly, they weren’t very good, and I hesitate even sharing them again. But I think it’s interesting context to compare to this new painting. And looking back, it appears I’ve painted kind of a hybrid of two previous sketches I did. That was not my intent, but I have to admit I am not especially creative when it comes to artwork, so it tracks that I would lean heavily on something I’d done before.

All that to say; there is somewhat of a history here for me. Both with the game itself and as a fan/enjoyer of other artwork related to Secret of Mana. With the foundation of interest in place, and about three years and 270ish oil paintings under my belt, why not try a painting in my style?

I love how this painting turned out. As with any of my enthusiastic feelings about my own art, I have to caveat by saying of course it’s no Rembrandt. But I like how it turned out quite a bit – I feel the final result captures the vibrant fantasy environment in a faithful way. And the characters feel like an effective transition of style from the cartoon or anime like depictions into my standard sketchy and muddy impressions of the original characters. I often do not plan well for any of my paintings (if I even plan at all). But for these, I did have to think about this ahead of time and figure out what I wanted to do. I did not do any sketches, but I certainly looked at the original designs for colors and distinctive features, and considered how they should be arranged. The scene itself is supposed to show the trio in serious discussion in front of the Mana Tree, perhaps with Primm (the woman in pink) wanting action, Randi the hero in blue discussing, with Popoi the short one in green maybe trying to get their attention.

I’ve embedded a discussion video from YouTube above – this is a time lapse of the painting process, running about six minutes. Within the video, I talk more about the notion of adapting styles and some of the challenges there. I also explore concepts I have explored before, including the idea of painting for fun. This to me is a fairly important one – I am not a professional artist and do this purely for the enjoyment of it. Often, my subject matter ends up being fairly basic head-and-shoulders portraits that are tailor-made for my limited time budget. But I really loved painting this Secret of Mana scene, and now my wheels are turning about how I can catch hold of this sort of fun time again. Initially, I wondered if I could do another Secret of Mana piece. But I quickly decided I would like to dive in to some other video games I enjoyed when I was a kid, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy. So, I hope there’s more to come down that path!

Here are some additional details of the video I shared on YouTube, including materials used and some other information. I’ll also embed the Shorts video, although it’s kind of redundant to the Instagram Reels post, as I typically just share the same edited vertical time lapse on both platforms. The main video I’ve embedded is around the usual amount, and is similar in format and presentation to some of the others I’ve done (also linked after the timestamps).

Discussion Video Timestamps: