Drawing a button

Here’s an excerpt from last 1,5 hours that I’ve spent designing a button for NG. This button to be exact:

I wanted to step off classic boring buttons and make something more colorful and modern, yet suitable for a medieval RTS. Something to help fill menus with beating life. Blood red and flag shape – what can be better? xD

Designed in vector, to allow to tweak all the little pieces without loss of quality.

First comes the outline and fill:

Pretty dull, heh? Okay, now we need some beveled edges:

Still boring. Next half an our is spent placing gradients on the edges and designing the highlight, and placing template text along the way:

Button needs an outline to stand out in menus and to allow nicer “push” animation:

Perhaps a little different tint, more goldish:

A bit darker tail and a little shadow between the button and the outline, it should not steal buttons thunder:

Lets make it a bit more pointy at the nose:

Tail should be a bit darker:

And that is semi-final result at which I have stopped as seen in the articles header:

Thanks for watching!