Some people are doing some great skins so, in the spirit of sharing and hoping to improve my methods, I thought I'd let you know how I've been doing. Looking forward to Egg's tips and I really hope Supersocks does a little guide for his methods because I reckon I could learn something - it's so precise.

So I'm going to use my Christmas Assegai as an example because it was one of the easiest but all of mine have used the same basics so far.

First thing is to copy the texture map from the skin editor. The copy button is on the colour selection screen. Then I paste the map into Photoshop. These maps are fantastic and, for me, always have remained the template - I find the closer I stick to Egg's maps, the better the craft look. From there, I keep the skin editor window open so I can figure out what part of the map corresponds to what on the ship. So I end up with this - http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26...ng/Asseg01.jpg

The weird thing about the Assegai is that some of the textures work in reverse - you can see the name 'Assegai' is backwards. As I needed to write 'Merry Christmas' and it turned out that the texture was split into two parts to go across the fins, I needed to be sure of the matching. On one side, the 'Assegai' text would give me the guide I needed. On the other, I didn't have that so I just copied and pasted the parts with the text over the sides without text. I just had to flip them. Here's what I mean - http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26...ng/Asseg02.jpg

Bear in mind, that was only for matching purposes.

Now here's the important part and this step varies depending on what I am doing. I need to colour the map the way I want it. With the Assegai, I knew I wanted to keep the basic colour pattern (so keeping the strips on the fins for example), so the easiest thing for me to do was use Hue/Saturation to just change the ship from blue to red. But there was a third colour on the Assegai that I didn't want - the goldy colour (I have no idea what that is). So I just went in and used the paint bucket to paint all of those bits to red (using the exact red tones of the rest of the ship). I also painted over a few of the detail sections I didn't want. Just used the pencil tool for that.

So here's what I ended up with - http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26...ng/Asseg03.jpg

It was all done with simple tools. For craft that had patterns I didn't want to keep, things were trickier. For example, on the Goteki, I wanted to keep Egg's shading but not all the colour patterns. So what I did was recolour the entire thing using the colour palette of just one colour - trying to retain the tones but not the colour patterns. Almost like I did for the browny bits in the Assegai.

So from here, I drew the details. On this, these were simple pixel drawings. Here's my holly - http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26...ng/Asseg04.jpg

I also did little bells and at the end I added some sparkles - http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26...ng/Asseg05.jpg

For the text, I always had those initial stages as reference and always went back to them. I just used a font so that was easy but splitting it was tricky, even with the guide. Turns out one side of the Assegai is in reverse, but not the other! But having the guide meant I could match it once I realised the reversal thing. http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26...ng/Asseg06.jpg

Lastly I finished off my sparkles and pasted red all over the bottom right. Like so - http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26...ng/Asseg07.jpg

The only thing left was to get it into the editor. On this, I was working in RGB so I could use layers and have a bit of freedom (although in this one the layers were more a safetly precaution - it could have been done without them). So I coverted it to Index colour, 16 colours. Then copied it and pasted it into the editor. That was it! My Christmas Assegai.

For some more adventurous craft (some that worked, others didn't), I did that recolour step to retain the shape and shading but not the colour. For example, here's my white AG-Sys template - http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y26...AGTemplate.jpg It took quite a while to recolour this while not losing the shading but the first thing I realised was that Egg's templates are fantastic and my ships will look best sticking as close to his as possible.

So from here, if I accept I'm going to go over my colours and try to bring it back in the Indexing process though dithering or whatever I'll try to colour it on another layer, whether a multiply layer or whatever.

And I often do a lot of touch-up back in the skin editor because sometimes I end up wth holes or colour overspill. Also some of the editor brushes are excellent for details.

So that's how I'm doing things right now. I'd love to hear what other people are doing as my craft seem to be getting worse, not better. Definitely want to hear from Egg (of course!) and Supersocks.