Drawing the Login Screen for Comic #717 (Patreon)

1. The Foreground

I inked the foreground armor and weapons first:

Then I added in the grass. I mostly drew it with the lasso tool and filled it with black. I then added some more fine details with a basic brush:

I then dropped the opacity of the grass to 65%:

I colored in the armor/weapons:

Then shaded them:

I added some small highlights to the armor/weapons:

And finally, I added a bit of "grunge" with a special "dirty" brush I use. If people are interested I can post a tutorial on making a dirty brush. You can see how I make brushes in one of my previous tutorials. This is probably one of the most useful brushes I have. It takes very little effort and it adds a lot to an image. I added black grunge with about 60% opacity to the armor and weapons, and added white with 60% opacity to the alliance flag:

2. The Background

First I drew the castle. I used the polygonal lasso tool and a filled it with the color you see.

I then added detail through subtraction. I drew out windows with the lasso tool and deleted them out, as well as erased other lines and details using a simple eraser tool.

I put a light yellow layer behind the castle to fill the details with color. I actually skipped this step by mistake on the original comic. You can see for yourself. The windows and lines are actually filled with the sky background. However, for the purposes of this tutorial I added this step back in to give a better finished product:

To make the sky, I started with a radial gradient fill.

I then added some clouds. Like with my grunge brush, I have a cloud/dust brush which is very useful. I've discussed this brush in a previous tutorial. In this case I used a black cloud brush on a low opacity. You'll notice I didn't fill the entire panel with clouds. Because the sky is only visible at the top of the final image, I didn't feel it was necessary. I also want to point out that when I actually draw these clouds, I have the castle layers visible in the foreground. I removed them here just so you could see the base layers.

Combined with the castle layers I have a mostly finished background:

And combined with our foreground we have this so far:

This looks pretty good, but it needs some haze. I added two layers of haze, the first I placed between the foreground and the background. This haze is simply a white cloud brush but on a much lower opacity.

I added a second haze in front of the foreground. (This one is not quite as noticable but it's there)

The User Interface

I can show more detail on how I layer these panels in another tutorial if you all are interested, just let me know. I first made the login UI. The input fields on the email and password are simply black fills with an 80% opacity, so the background will show through a little (as they do in the game).

Then I made the popup window as a separate layer, the background of which is also a black fill with an 80% opacity so you can see the login UI underneath it.

Combining these elements together we have the final result: