The Sacking Of Maranda

Okay, you better goddamn like this one! It took me all week to finish! This took much, much, MUCH longer than my normal pinup girls. Getting all the elements to fit together and all the layers to play nice with each other took FOREVER! And once again, it really wasn't until it was almost finished that I really felt like I had something that worked.

This is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time, and I finally felt like I'd reached a point where I could pull it off. It's a scene from Final Fantasy VI, before Celes defected from the Empire, when she led the attack on Maranda. 

As far as I can tell, no one else has done anything like this before. I haven't seen anything showing Celes when she was still with the Empire. I guess I can see why, it's really dark in tone. Most people want to show the heroes of the story being, well, heroic. I told my friend about this idea quite some time ago and he didn't quite get why I'd want to depict Celes as evil.

Not evil. I don't think she was ever EVIL. Villains never think they're being evil. At the time, she probably believed she was doing this for the safety and prosperity of her home, or maybe even for Maranda's own good because that city would now be a part of the glorious Gestahlian Empire, if only those pesky resisters can be eliminated first. She was deceived into this, and she didn't come to her senses until shortly before we met her in the story. 

As for her design, I pretty much stuck to her sprite design, but made armor a little heavier. I put a steel breastplate over her green bodysuit, and I have her gauntlets and more heavily-armored boots, etc. Also, I ditched the bluish colors for a straight-up grey. It just seemed more aggressive to stick to the neutrals like that. 

I've never drawn a chocobo before, not one that's supposed to be of a realistic scale. That required some new thinking. I just had to stick to my instincts, and it took a bit of trial and error. 

But none of it really came together until I added the environment. Once I had that dark sky, and the flaming buildings, and the embers in the foreground with the tattered Imperial banner and the spearhead silhouettes. Everything just sort of clicked at the end.