Final Fantasy VI Painting | Celes and Ultros Opera Scene

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The eighth oil painting in my classic RPG series is another scene from Final Fantasy VI – can you tell this is an all-time favorite? Obviously an amazing and memorable game, and with such a large cast of characters, it’s challenging to include all of my favorites. This painting features one of the (many) protagonists, Celes Chere, a former General for the Empire who joins the heroes. I wanted to do something related to the opera house scenes, but in all honesty, I couldn’t remember more than bits and pieces. From memory-refresher Google searches, I know Locke is involved, and there is a plot to lure the airship Captain Setzer. And then comical villain octopus Ultros shows up to foil everything. I’m really happy with how the painting turned out, but I wasn’t able to accomplish everything I wanted with the scene.

This Celes and Ultros oil painting was done on 12″ X 12″ oil paper and was my 278th 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.

Celes watching the troublesome octopus villain Ultros, Final Fantasy VI, oil on paper.

Getting back to the intent with this piece, I mentioned some other characters from the actual game’s presentation of the plot. Originally, I thought to at least get Setzer somewhere, perhaps looking shocked. But I couldn’t figure out a good arrangement of characters – where to place all three to see facial expressions in a way that actually makes sense. This really speaks to the challenges I have with composition sometimes. Occasionally, I don’t even think about it much and just throw characters into whatever place first pops into my mind. But here, I couldn’t get that far. So, eventually I settle on this arrangement, but I had in mind to put Locke in the background behind the octopus. Maybe ready for battle, or possibly startled. I’ll embed some timelapses of the painting process below – you can see I originally had a sketch of him in the back, but as I was painting, I decided it didn’t work, so I just painted over him.

Overall, I think this turned into a good piece! I like how I ended up rendering the characters. A major part of this video game series, as I’ve discussed in other posts and videos, has been to transform these characters into my own art style. Give my spin on them and how they could be merged into a quasi-realistic/impressionist type of look. This one definitely got there!

As I continue to paint these nostalgia-driven scenes, I’m trying to keep up with discussion and videos on these pieces. I have not done a good job of keeping up with blog posts, but hey there are only so many hours in the day. In the interest of keeping these organized, some of the other blog posts in this classic video game series:

Also, I’ve embedded a discussion video from YouTube above – this is a time lapse of the painting process with some discussion with the process. Within these videos, I try to either condense a walkthrough video into a fairly short time frame or focus on a specific topic. This one is more of a traditional walkthrough in a sense, but really just kind of veers into whatever topic related to the painting that came to mind.

I’ll add 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:

Other video game videos:

Materials Used:

Colors Used:

🎞️ Here are the playlists I’ve grouped my art videos into:

🎨 Here are some other painting walkthroughs:

✏️ Here are some pencil drawing videos:

@amdallgallery

Final Fantasy VI Celes vs Ultros Opera Scene, oil on paper. I took a few months break from painting, but have resumed my classic rpg series with this one. My take on the classic opera scene. I like how it turned out, but this is a compromise from my original plan – I’d hoped for a more complex scene but just couldn’t get there. #art #finalfantasy #finalfantasy6 #painting #fanart

♬ Awakening (From “Final Fantasy 6”) [LoFi Version] – Collosia
Blick Art Materials

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