Ben Eblen Illustrating a Stylized Character – 7 hour real-time walk through

From short IG tips and tricks to this long-form walkthrough
This is a real-time walk-through filled with actionable, in-context explanations of my thoughts and techniques when it came to creating this character from sketch to rendered painting.

Diving deeper and sharing more than I ever have online
Taking you behind the scenes into my thought process where I explain my techniques and more importantly ‘why’ I’m doing certain things that otherwise might have been a bit too tricky/lengthy to tackle through a social media post or short video.

Have you ever thought 💭…

How do I exaggerate the shapes and make the character feel ‘Stylized’?
When/how do I shade things in certain ways to make them feel ‘realistic’ yet ‘stylized’?
What brushes should I use? (It’s really not that important!)
How do I steer away from the realistic photo reference and create my own character?
How do I take a black and white painting and convert it to colour (‘convert’ isn’t the right way of thinking about it btw)
My drawings are feeling very ‘flat’ how do I give them ‘life’ and ‘dimension’?
What do ‘layer modes’ do and how do I use them?
In this 7+ hour walk-through, my goal is to show you my answer to these questions in the context of illustrating this character from scratch.

What you’ll learn 🧠
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have an understanding of…

• What I’m thinking about when I’m simplifying and stylizing from photo reference
• The artists that were on my reference board for this illustration
• My thoughts around ‘thinking in 3D’ (accompanied by some 3D models to study from)
• How I think about line-work and some actionable tips to achieve ‘dynamic’ feeling line-work
• My thought process around inventing the illusion of light (rendering)
• How ‘thinking clearly’ leads to ‘cleaner’ work
• ‘finishing’ the illustration and adding those fun things like ‘rim lights’ etc
• Technical tips on layer modes & layer organisation (demonstrated in both Photoshop and Procreate but it applies to most painting software)
• All the tools I used
• I’ll be sharing some of my recommended resources that personally helped me with topics like anatomy and rendering for you to dive deeper into