Minor Skin Edits For Dummies

[Urahra 5359]

Minor Skin Edits For Dummies

 

So there's a LOT of you who don't seem to know how to make small edits to skins. I get a lot of people who ask me to copy/paste one skin's head onto another. Well, you don't need a fancy art program to make skins. Here's a three step guide to editing your own skins.

 

STEP ONE: GET PAINT.NET

 

 

Paint.net is a free, easy to use program that you can download from the internet. I use it to do almost all of my skinning. It's like MS paint but "upgraded." Don't worry, it's reliable and virus free. If you're too lazy to type in the url, here's a link for you: http://www.getpaint.net/

 

Go to the "Download" page and get the version appropriate for your computer.

 

 

In my experience, the download is very quick and painless. So this shouldn't take long.

 

STEP TWO: GET TO KNOW PAINT.NET

 

Once the download is complete, open up Paint.net and take a look at your screen. It should look something like this:

 

 

In this exercise, we're going to be looking at the layers window and the tools window.

 

 

Hover over all your tools and get to know what they do. These tools are going to make your life quite a bit easier. Pay special attention to the selection tools - the Rectangle Select, the Ellipse Select, the Magic Wand, and the Lasso. The Move Selection and Move Selected Pixels tools are also important.

 

The Selection tools allow you to isolate a group of pixels and color them, move them around, etc., without altering the other pixels on the image. I think that these tools are VERY important when it comes to skinning. Since you're working with such tiny pixels, it's important to select what you want to alter so that you don't ruin the rest of the skin.

 

The other tools are also important. The paint brush is very helpful as long as you disable antialiasing. Although I often turn antialiasing on and off depending on what I'm doing. Your antialiasing options are on your toolbar next to the Brush Width and Fill options. Check out the difference. It's especially noticeable on small images like Minecraft skins.

 

The brush, eraser, and the selection tools are what I use most often while skinning. So I'd advise you to get friendly with 'em.

 

The layers window is going to be your BEST FRIEND. Do you know what the layers window lets you do? It allows you to put pixels on different "layers" - obviously. When I skin, I often have a 'clothing' layer, a 'hair' layer, and a 'face' layer. If you know anything about MC skins, layers are often like the 'hat' portion of a skin. It lets you paint over something without painting over it. Pixels on different layers are also isolated from each other, so what you do to one layer won't affect the other layers.

 

Layers are awesome.

 

You also have a lot of options when it comes to layers. You can duplicate a layer (very useful), merge two layers (also useful). If you double click a layer, you will bring up an options menu where you can alter its blending mode (VERY USEFUL) and its opacity, meaning you can turn a layer translucent or see-through (SO USEFUL OMG).

 

Please play around with these features, get used to them.

 

STEP THREE: EDIT SOME SKINS

 

Okay, you're probably sitting there like "Ugh, shut up and just tell me how to edit my skins, Urara, GOD."

 

We're getting to that part.

 

Okay, say that I want to edit one skin's head onto another skin. First off, open up your two skins. They'll appear in your toolbar like this:

 

 

Just click on them to switch between them. Easy peasy.

 

Okay, so I have this skin of a knight in a green tabard. I want to put my lady skin's head on his body. So here's what I do.

 

 

Use the Rectangle Select tool and select his head. This is what it will look like when his head is selected. Then just hit the delete key. Poof, beheaded! Much quicker and cleaner than using a guillotine.

 

Now I go to my other skin and use the tool to select the whole thing. I click back to my newly-behead skin and click 'Paste in a New Layer'.

 

As you can see, my girl skin is in the new layer over my knight skin.

 

 

Now all I have to do is erase the bits of my lady skin that I no longer want. In this situation, it's her entire body.

 

 

As you can see, I erased all of her skin except for her head and hair. You can see the Green Knight skin beneath her hair now. Looks good! Green suits her.

 

 

Now all I have to do is hit the 'Merge Layer' button and voila! It's all one layer now! Just save as a .png and she's ready to roll!

 

 

Lady Knight ready to teach her enemies a lesson, hooyah!

 

(I just realized I forgot to edit the color of her hands. Whoopsie. Oh well. I did this in like five minutes.)

 

Now, naturally, you can use these tools for a LOT more than just minor skin edits. I do all of my skins in Paint.net and I find it to be very useful for a free paint program. I think it's pretty great. So play around with it.

 

Go forth and edit skins!

 

 

 

[Ford 1990]

Ooh.10/10

[Lyuin 65]

Pretty useful for those who need skinning tips but I' get this weird problem where for some reason, it applies a white background to anywhere I don't draw on the skin basically meaning even if I erase the white it re-appears in game.

[susitsu 870]

It's too bad I spent ten minutes doing a 30 second job just before this guide was posted q_q

[monkeypoacher 6993]

0/10 uses pixlr.net

[The Cleaning Crew 571]

Pretty useful for those who need skinning tips but I' get this weird problem where for some reason, it applies a white background to anywhere I don't draw on the skin basically meaning even if I erase the white it re-appears in game.

Were you using paint.net? Not paint, but paint.net. With paint there's no option to save it with transparency so it fills in the empty space with white. But with paint.net, when you erase what you don't want, it's replaced with gray and white squares that stay see-through as long as you keep it on paint.net or another drawing tool that supports transparency. Also, save it as a PNG. JPEG won't keep transparency.