People often ask about skin making in second life. There are some excellent skins on the grid and they are the standard which is already set that you need to aspire to. Here are my top ten tips to give you something to think about when deciding that you want to make skins.

1. Read all of the second life web site information on making clothes and skin and using the templates provided. There are no short cuts, no quick fix. If making skins well was easy everyone would do it.

2. Know your graphics program. You will need to be familiar with your graphics program to make good skins or clothes so spend a little time each day just playing with it and learning how to do things, where different tools are and what they do. People use many graphics programs. I have photoshop CS2 and paint shop pro 7 on my computer. I use both for different things and both have tools that I like better than the other.

3. Before you jump into skin, get to know the templates that are provided on the second life site
Second Life and become familiar with them, and how they correspond to the human body. Remember that you are making something which will wrap around a 3d mesh and it is important to aware of this when you are working. This is why nipples and shading can sometimes be distorted on an avatar, be aware of how the 3 shape works so that it will help you to mold your skin to
it successfully.

4. Try making t shirts and other items of clothing before you start on skins. This is great practice for knowing where the joins and seams of the avatar are and how the textures work on a 3d mesh.

5. Look at lots of pictures of naked people and faces. These will help you to become comfortable and familiar with human anatomy, something you need to help you to make a nice skin. Too often people think it’s all about make up and don’t think about the back or the back of the legs etc. These are all areas you will have to make on your skin.

6. Get an old fashioned sketch pad and pencil and practice drawing still life and particularly shading, as this is vital for a good skin. Even if you think you aren’t the best artist, learning how the body parts look, how and where it curves and what shapes it has will help you improve, no matter what your drawing ability. Practice really does make perfect.

7. Look at skin colours, particularly in lots of images of people of different tans and ethnicity. Make yourself a chart of skin colour swatches that you can use later for colouring your skintones.

8. Be patient, persistant and prepared to work quite hard as making skin can involve many hours of work to get things right.

9. Try to organise your work as much as possible and name and number everything so that you know which file you are working on.

10. Save everything you do every 10 minutes. I have crashed before and been unable to work on a file I had almost completed. If you have a save from ten minutes before, you can work from that, if you don’t and your file won’t open, you may be right back where you started.

Good luck, have fun!