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Through the years, Minecraft skins have become quite the art form. They've grown from our main guy Steve to masterpieces in which each pixel is placed with thorough consideration. Some skins aren't even made to be used in-game anymore, but rather made for the sake of art.
I joined the Minecraft community about 7 years ago, and started creating skins soon after. The reason why I wanted to make a skin, is because I wanted a female character in the game, and not be Steve. Alex didn't exist back then, and so I created a skin to represent what I looked like at the time.
This is an awkward reminder of my emo phase with purple hair extension, studded belt and panda eyeliner included... Long before the 1.8 update, so no 3D layer for the body and mirrored limbs. I used a program named SkinEdit which had a function to add "noise" to a skin. Back in the day, I liked noise on skins because I felt it was true to the feel of the Minecraft vanilla look.
Making a skin was fun to me, so I made some more and uploaded them to a site named SkinCache (which doesn't seem to exist anymore). I made a clown, skeleton, Link (are you really a skin maker if you never made Link?), cookie monster... I've made nearly 600 skins and I still remember exactly which ones were the first ones I made, simply because I had such great fun making them.
After making a couple of skins, I ran out of ideas and figured I could make skins for other people. So I signed up on the Minecraft forums and started a skin shop. This is when I learned the definition of no-life by experience because for days and days I was creating Minecraft skins for people. Do you know what a kendama is? No? Me neither, but I did make a skin of it!
Happens often that I say "I don't know that character, but I believe I made a skin of it once." They were all noise skins. I would draw the base colors of the skin to the best of my ability and then put noise all over them. I must've made more than a hundred skins this way.
Having a skin shop did teach me to be creative about skin design. But I didn't learn anything about coloring and shading. Not until someone requested a Gothic Lolita skin. The reference image had black-on-black layering which was an effect that I wouldn't be able to achieve with just noise. And so I asked the help of a friend on the forums back in the day, who had their own skin shop: TwiDragon.
TwiDragon was the person who introduced me to the world of shading skins. And even though my first shading was very minimal, it was quite the upgrade from my noise skins. What I did was "outline" each part of the skin with a darker shade of the base color, working towards the middle or side in a gradient palette. Sometimes it worked alright, sometimes it looked awful. I continued my skin shop with this new "style".
Back then I felt like that was it, my ultimate skin making style. I felt like I was a pro at making skins and there wasn't really much room for improvement. In this manner I made over a hundred skins as well, and everyone who requested a skin was happy with these creations which made me feel confident with my skin making skills.
Until I singed up to PMC, hoping to make use of the skin previewer to help me post previews of skins on the Minecraft forums. Coming here, I was blown away by the work of other skin makers. Blender and Halucid in particular, who were far ahead of the rest of the skin making community at the time. This, together with community contests, is what sparked the motivation in me to try and get better. It's when I started to truly experiment with creating skins. Some experiments were alright, some were terrible, and I was figuring out new techniques.
This is when I learned my most important piece of skin making advice: experiment, experiment, experiment. Because that's the key to improvement. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, at one point you will never get better at what you're doing. Don't be too quick to settle for a "style", and don't be afraid to do something out of your habit or comfort zone.
The next step in my skin making journey is when creators such as Leostereo, Lantosyt and Danori started dominating the pop reel on the PMC skin section. These creators (if memory serves) had a background in texture packs or pixel art and they brought knowledge of color theory, and particularly the technique now commonly known as HUE-shifting. Some of the popular creators of that time (about 5 or 6 years ago) used a "realistic" shading style while others were experimenting with blocky, abstract or simplistic shading.
At this time I was really starting to get "up there" with my skins. Whenever I put out a new one it would hit the pop reel in a matter of hours and I gained a lot of subscribers. My skins were still experiments and my shading was better than ever before but varied a lot in style and "quality". It's around this time when I started the PMCSA (a skin community group), started writing tutorials and was trying to encourage other people to experiment with their skins too. It's also when I started using MCskin3D, which helped me to better pick colors for my skins. Thanks Paril! (Once I had installed it, I regretted not doing that sooner.)
It's also when I had a lot of fellow skin makers on Skype to exchange feedback, look at WIP's and learn a lot from what other people were doing with their skins. This is a very fast way to learn, but beware, because it may also limit the way you look at skins. At one point I had developed a new "style" again, in which I made slightly a hue-shifted color palette and shaded each part of the skin in the same way, hardly using transparency if any at all. It was somewhere in the middle of realistic shading and simplistic shading and I made each and every skin this way. This is when I pretty much stopped improving again.
They were good, but they were lazy. I kept applying the same "trick" to each skin. It almost became like a Snapchat filter you throw on each picture; not original, not unique, nothing new to see. At some point I was able to make a skin like this in under an hour and the fun of learning something new was completely gone. However the fun of teaching something new was still there. I continued to give feedback to other skin creators and organized contests and events.
I also ended up developing a standard way for myself to shade hair, with a clear separation of the hair up top. I wrote a tutorial for this at some point and I might do that again sometime since I noticed a lot of decent skin-makers on PMC today have trouble shading the top of the head. Please let me know if you'd appreciate a tutorial for this.
Some of you may know that I ended up leaving PMC at one point due to some problems and disagreements. This was five years ago. During my time away from PMC I didn't really create any skins. Only when the 1.8 update came out, is when I was inspired to try something again. I made the odd few 1.8+ skins to try it out. Again in the same old shading style I was "stuck" in. But it did allow for some fun creativity with the new layers!
I made only 10 of these skins when I wasn't on PMC. 10 skins in 5 years is not many.. The new 1.8 update allowed me to do create things I could only dream of back when I had my skin shop on the forums and during my time on PMC. But when it fianlly came out it did seem kind of disappointing at first. Making a skin felt like a lot more "work" than it did before, not to mention that all my well-made old skins were now "outdated". Mirrored limbs and no extra 3D layer inspired great creativity to create optical illusions and workarounds which was now no longer needed.
But that was a bit of a pessimistic way of looking at it. The 1.8 template does allow for great creativity, just in a different way. An infinity of new possibilities came with it that I have yet to discover. I only recently returned to PMC and I should give credit to DragonsDungeon for inspiring a new way for me to look at skin creating. I'm trying not to fall back into old habits and to try new things. To not create a palette up front to strictly keep to, but rather try something different with colors for a change. And to think of creating a new skin as a fun challenge rather than a task.
The most important recent lesson I've learned is that there's not one "right" way to make a skin or to create a color palette. And also that HUE-shifting can be great but it doesn't work for every skin. Making skins is an art form and you are free to do with it as you please. I tried to apply these new insights into my newest two skins and I am hoping to create more original skins soon.
Thank you to anyone who read the whole post. I hope this blog post will inspire some skin creators to look at skins from a different perspective. Also I hope you liked reading about my journey as a skin creator. Please share thoughts and ideas in the comments. I would love to know how you think about skin styles, shading, coloring and what place Minecraft skins hold in your mind. In the beginning I never thought there could be this much to a Minecraft skin.
I joined the Minecraft community about 7 years ago, and started creating skins soon after. The reason why I wanted to make a skin, is because I wanted a female character in the game, and not be Steve. Alex didn't exist back then, and so I created a skin to represent what I looked like at the time.
Making a skin was fun to me, so I made some more and uploaded them to a site named SkinCache (which doesn't seem to exist anymore). I made a clown, skeleton, Link (are you really a skin maker if you never made Link?), cookie monster... I've made nearly 600 skins and I still remember exactly which ones were the first ones I made, simply because I had such great fun making them.
Happens often that I say "I don't know that character, but I believe I made a skin of it once." They were all noise skins. I would draw the base colors of the skin to the best of my ability and then put noise all over them. I must've made more than a hundred skins this way.
Having a skin shop did teach me to be creative about skin design. But I didn't learn anything about coloring and shading. Not until someone requested a Gothic Lolita skin. The reference image had black-on-black layering which was an effect that I wouldn't be able to achieve with just noise. And so I asked the help of a friend on the forums back in the day, who had their own skin shop: TwiDragon.
TwiDragon was the person who introduced me to the world of shading skins. And even though my first shading was very minimal, it was quite the upgrade from my noise skins. What I did was "outline" each part of the skin with a darker shade of the base color, working towards the middle or side in a gradient palette. Sometimes it worked alright, sometimes it looked awful. I continued my skin shop with this new "style".
Back then I felt like that was it, my ultimate skin making style. I felt like I was a pro at making skins and there wasn't really much room for improvement. In this manner I made over a hundred skins as well, and everyone who requested a skin was happy with these creations which made me feel confident with my skin making skills.
Until I singed up to PMC, hoping to make use of the skin previewer to help me post previews of skins on the Minecraft forums. Coming here, I was blown away by the work of other skin makers. Blender and Halucid in particular, who were far ahead of the rest of the skin making community at the time. This, together with community contests, is what sparked the motivation in me to try and get better. It's when I started to truly experiment with creating skins. Some experiments were alright, some were terrible, and I was figuring out new techniques.
This is when I learned my most important piece of skin making advice: experiment, experiment, experiment. Because that's the key to improvement. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, at one point you will never get better at what you're doing. Don't be too quick to settle for a "style", and don't be afraid to do something out of your habit or comfort zone.
The next step in my skin making journey is when creators such as Leostereo, Lantosyt and Danori started dominating the pop reel on the PMC skin section. These creators (if memory serves) had a background in texture packs or pixel art and they brought knowledge of color theory, and particularly the technique now commonly known as HUE-shifting. Some of the popular creators of that time (about 5 or 6 years ago) used a "realistic" shading style while others were experimenting with blocky, abstract or simplistic shading.
At this time I was really starting to get "up there" with my skins. Whenever I put out a new one it would hit the pop reel in a matter of hours and I gained a lot of subscribers. My skins were still experiments and my shading was better than ever before but varied a lot in style and "quality". It's around this time when I started the PMCSA (a skin community group), started writing tutorials and was trying to encourage other people to experiment with their skins too. It's also when I started using MCskin3D, which helped me to better pick colors for my skins. Thanks Paril! (Once I had installed it, I regretted not doing that sooner.)
It's also when I had a lot of fellow skin makers on Skype to exchange feedback, look at WIP's and learn a lot from what other people were doing with their skins. This is a very fast way to learn, but beware, because it may also limit the way you look at skins. At one point I had developed a new "style" again, in which I made slightly a hue-shifted color palette and shaded each part of the skin in the same way, hardly using transparency if any at all. It was somewhere in the middle of realistic shading and simplistic shading and I made each and every skin this way. This is when I pretty much stopped improving again.
They were good, but they were lazy. I kept applying the same "trick" to each skin. It almost became like a Snapchat filter you throw on each picture; not original, not unique, nothing new to see. At some point I was able to make a skin like this in under an hour and the fun of learning something new was completely gone. However the fun of teaching something new was still there. I continued to give feedback to other skin creators and organized contests and events.
I also ended up developing a standard way for myself to shade hair, with a clear separation of the hair up top. I wrote a tutorial for this at some point and I might do that again sometime since I noticed a lot of decent skin-makers on PMC today have trouble shading the top of the head. Please let me know if you'd appreciate a tutorial for this.
Some of you may know that I ended up leaving PMC at one point due to some problems and disagreements. This was five years ago. During my time away from PMC I didn't really create any skins. Only when the 1.8 update came out, is when I was inspired to try something again. I made the odd few 1.8+ skins to try it out. Again in the same old shading style I was "stuck" in. But it did allow for some fun creativity with the new layers!
I made only 10 of these skins when I wasn't on PMC. 10 skins in 5 years is not many.. The new 1.8 update allowed me to do create things I could only dream of back when I had my skin shop on the forums and during my time on PMC. But when it fianlly came out it did seem kind of disappointing at first. Making a skin felt like a lot more "work" than it did before, not to mention that all my well-made old skins were now "outdated". Mirrored limbs and no extra 3D layer inspired great creativity to create optical illusions and workarounds which was now no longer needed.
But that was a bit of a pessimistic way of looking at it. The 1.8 template does allow for great creativity, just in a different way. An infinity of new possibilities came with it that I have yet to discover. I only recently returned to PMC and I should give credit to DragonsDungeon for inspiring a new way for me to look at skin creating. I'm trying not to fall back into old habits and to try new things. To not create a palette up front to strictly keep to, but rather try something different with colors for a change. And to think of creating a new skin as a fun challenge rather than a task.
The most important recent lesson I've learned is that there's not one "right" way to make a skin or to create a color palette. And also that HUE-shifting can be great but it doesn't work for every skin. Making skins is an art form and you are free to do with it as you please. I tried to apply these new insights into my newest two skins and I am hoping to create more original skins soon.
Thank you to anyone who read the whole post. I hope this blog post will inspire some skin creators to look at skins from a different perspective. Also I hope you liked reading about my journey as a skin creator. Please share thoughts and ideas in the comments. I would love to know how you think about skin styles, shading, coloring and what place Minecraft skins hold in your mind. In the beginning I never thought there could be this much to a Minecraft skin.
| Credit | Cyprezz |
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I believe I was level 67 when I left. :)
Good to have you back ^-^