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Skyyobee's Extensive Skinning Guide [Incomplete] [Wip]


SkyyoBee
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Warning – this guide is image intensive (as necessary for a skinning tutorial) and may cause lag when a spoiler is opened.

 

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About a year and a half ago when I was fairly new to Lord of the Craft I decided I wanted to be able to make my own skins. This is because I hated wearing a skin I wasn’t fully happy with and I wanted to be able to create designs for myself and others. I was inspired by Randomness710 (thanks cmack ;) ) who is an excellent skinner known for her desirable skins. Instead of simply asking for one, however, I sent her a private message asking for skinning advice. She told me her methods. I tried them and some suited me, some didn’t. I spent lengths of time googling in an attempt to work out how to shade (the thing I struggled with the most), how to design and good programs to use – I found there are very few decent guides, so I decided to make one of my own. In this guide I will take you through what I have discovered works best for me (many of you may take elements of my techniques if learning to skin, everything, or nothing at all, it really depends on how you work). It’s taken me around a year and a half of practice to get to where I am with skinning today, so I encourage you all not to give up! Keep trying until you find something that works for you and continue to perfect it :) this is simply a guide for ideas.

 

 

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Added step #2 - the body

Added beginning of step #3 - shading

Added to step #3

 

 

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I will be making a female noble skin for the purpose of this tutorial as I find females are often more difficult (in both hair and clothing).

 

~Step One – The Head~
This stage involves the basic designing of both female and male heads.

I use three programs when skinning, the first being minershoes.com
Only basic colours are necessary to begin with, they are easily changed when shading so don’t worry about them too much, the minershoes stage is more about the design.
I use this program for an initial design, starting off with a base skin. You can type the name of any MC player into the search bar and it will pop up (useful for skin edits) so I type in the name of my alt lmfao111222333 as I have a base skin on this account (feel free to use it)
Enter the name in this box-

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And a skin will pop up

 

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From this I like to start on the head. Select a hair colour and use this colour to create a fringe. There are a couple of ways I like to do my fringes, demonstrated below

Female fringes (these are just a few examples, not the only ones I use)

 

DNFjX5G.png Qv0orM6.png aO2zdpZ.png aOU6sSv.png U7Pxtm7.png

 

Male fringes will basically be the same but shorter strands on the sides of the face. As for the rest of the head, I always shape the head by filling in everything but the corners as I feel it gives more of a curved feel (as demonstrated below), I do this on both female and male heads, although the sides of male heads don’t start from the bottom they work towards it from the fringe.

 

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The eyes, eyebrows and mouth are all that need to be added now (noses don’t really work on skins), I like to do 2x2 eyes for females and 2x1 for males. If you don’t want to include a mouth position the eyes further down on the face and lower the fringe, I will be including a mouth though. Below are examples of both male eyes and female eyes (without eyebrows)

 

(Credit to Kaydovee_ for the following extra) A woman's skin doesn't /ALWAYS/ required 2x2 eyes, check out these for an example. They provide a 'alluring' look; rather than the adorable, cute eyes we see on a regular basis.

 

Example:

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With female eyes, always have the darker colour on the top; you can also have a darker white to add more depth. Next we need to add eyebrows, on male eyes it is best to simply add two (the same colour as the hair) on top, females usually have two on the sides too (demonstrated below)

 

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For the mouth simply choose a colour slightly darker than the face colour (so a shade from the body as it is already shaded) like so

 

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Once this is done you will need to colour the base head under the hair so the hair looks 3D (I like to do this after the face is done as sometimes it can get in the way)

 

Like this-

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The head will end up looking something like this-

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The face is now complete and will be shaded soon!

 

~Step two – the body~

This step explains how to design a body

 

 

To start we need to add hair length. I like to have the hair falling to both sides of the front of the head as well as the back (this isn’t necessary for a male skin). If the fringe has two inward curving strands it is ideal to add some to the hair length too. There are many ways the hair part can be done, just play around and see what you can come up with! I decided on fairly straight with a slight curve at the end.

 

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Now onto the clothing, this is probably one of the most difficult parts of skinning. My character is a noble so she will be wearing a dress, it will be long sleeved and go to the floor to demonstrate modesty. I like to create the patterns first as I find they are extremely important in a dress. The sleeves and front body of a dress are most important for design. Firstly I select a base colour and create a design with it. I’ve decided the dress will be blue.

 

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I then choose similar colours and fill the dress in. Remember to keep the colours basic and don’t try to shade – that will be done later.

 

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The body is now complete! It’s time to begin shading.

 

~Step three – shading~

 

 

In my opinion, shading is the most important element to skinning. You can fully transform a terrible skin by simply shading it. Take the two skins below as an example.

 

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Shading is very difficult to learn and styles will differ between skinners. Below are a couple of examples of different types of shading.

 

 

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“Box shading”
I feel this style should only be used for cartoon style skins, highly characterised. I like it although I rarely use it.

 

 

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“Cheque shading”
This style looks most effective as hair or to add texture to clothing. I would never use this as skin.

 

 

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“Noise shading”
Many know of my hatred of this style. It lacks realism and simply looks ugly.

 

 

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“Square shading”
This is probably one of the most common styles. Although I don’t think it looks bad, I don’t love the effect it creates.

 

 

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“Textured shading”
This is how I shade; I find it allows for much more freedom.

 

Now onto the shading of our skin!

 

I like to use a program known as GIMP 2. Google it and you will find the download. It has a couple of tools that I love. To get your skin from minershoes to Gimp once the design is complete, all you need to do is click this icon-

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And download it to your computer. Load Gimp up and import it!

 

Now you have Gimp up, your screen should look like this (note- I lost the skin file so colours may be slightly different on this skin, the design and general idea is still the same)-

 

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Then click on the zoom in the bottom left corner and replace the 100% with 1300% (make sure your tab is full screen) you will now be zoomed up on the skin. Everything you need is in the two boxes (or one if a tool isn’t selected) floating beside the skin. The toolbox looks like this

 

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and these tools will help you out a great deal.

 

The first tool I’ll be teaching you how to use will be the ‘fuzzy select tool’ that looks like this: u0htZej.png this tool lets you select certain sections in the skin based on colour (which is good for shading different textures) when you click on the tool another box will pop up, you can use this to adjust the ‘threshold’ which is the strength of the select.  A higher threshold will select more shades of a colour than a lower threshold.

 

The next tool (which is my most used in shading) is the ‘dodge’ tool. You can use this tool alone to shade a skin. It looks like this: 0Xlkyz9.png and when you click it, the box beside will have quite a few options – most of which are very useful. The first one is opacity and I like to have this very low (at around 5-6) as it allows for much more accuracy. The next option is brush, which I never change. Size is useful, I start off with a large brush (around 1.00) for initial texturing then make it smaller later on for detail. Next, with brush dynamics, when doing general texturing you don’t want to check any but when doing detail or when you want to shade specific pixels have ‘hard edge’ checked. I don’t use any of the other options. Dodge and burn options basically mean lighter and darker (dodge being lighter) and once one is selected you can press ‘ctrl’ while shading to obtain the other one. As for range I usually have it at midtones and exposure at 50.0.

 

Next is the ‘smudge’ tool 6N8Htne.png which is perfect for blending (so if you have pre-shaded by hand or you want to get to noise) the settings are fairly similar to the ones above.

 

Other than the pencil and colour select those are basically the main tools I use.

 

To be continued.

 

More to be added soon~ 
Feedback is appreciated! I'd also love to hear how you guys skin/learnt to skin :)

 

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'The Guide needs more Shading'

 

Good guide though!

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'The Guide needs more Shading'

 

Good guide though!

It's a WIP, shading to come ^-^

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Randomness was my skinning teacher as well, around the same time period too. I learned very similar methods from her.

 

Keep it coming, the guide's looking good!

 

And it's Randomness710 by the way. :p

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This is a nice skinning guide~ I like it; do moaaaar!

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Added step #2 - the body

 

Thanks for the feedback! :)

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Skyyo you're an FM again woooooo!!!!

 

Also guide is good.

Ski <3

Woooo! And thanks :D

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This skinning guide is sure to be handy to both newcomers and veterans alike; providing new ideas and influencing. I personally, myself heavily enjoyed the visual features you'd added, it has clearly come in handy, and has been well used to produce such a great skinning guide.

 

Nice work, SkyyoBee.

 

 

P.S:

 

A woman's skin doesn't /ALWAYS/ require 2x2 eyes, check out these for an example. They provide an 'alluring' look; rather than the adorable, cute eyes we see on a regular basis.

 

Example:

R1DCMY5.png

 

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I was so proud of myself when I found out how to shade my skins and thought of myself as a great skinner!

...Until I found this guide...

:'(

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Added the beginning of step #3 - shading 

It's going to be a big step so I'm going to add it in parts.

Kaydovee I'll add that in later :P thanks <3

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Skyyo remember me? No? Okay.

 

 

I skin too, learned by playing about, I use Paint.net.

 

 

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I kinda suck at it but heres some of my skins. <3

 

 

I cant make something from scratch, I suck at it. Instead I make many templates of different various things such as boots, leggings, shirts and outlines. Then shade them after putting them together.

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