SKINHELP SECTION - Quake1

Well I'm sure your eager to get into the guts of the actual skin 'making' process now so I've shown below how I make a Quakelord skin as an example until such time as I can be bothered to go into detail about techniques that will help you make the skin look good.

The Example skin in this case is QL.Balroq our latest Recruit. It seldom happens but he didnt ask for ANYTHING in particular, not once did I hear what kind of skin he wanted so I just used his name as a starting point. The name Balroq sounds to me like something you would find in a Conan film so I decided to make that kind of character; or as near to it as the QL skin format would allow.

***When making a whole set of clan skins you should take a lot of time designing the original base, as as time goes on you may end up doing more of them than you suspect and a poorly designed base will make things awkward later***

Balroq is an LPB so I use the LPB base (i.e the one with the white stripes) to aid me in making the new skin quicker. The first thing I want to change is the shoulder pads as I want something pretty differnet for his shoulders and arms.

The Fact that I've done lots of QL skins makes this next step easy as I simply cut QL.Dragon's arms off and paste them onto him(luckily when doing the QL.Dragon skin I saved the arms before I put the tatto's on). This here is a good example of why its always best to make backups of your work along the way.

Next step is to give him some cool shoulder pads and whilst doing the skin I was watching the Water Margin and noticed one of the warriors of Liang Shan Po had a nice brown leather top with a sort of thatch design. So I applied this to my skin and made a layout or it.

Once I've finished the layout of one shoulder pad I simply make a mask of the pad and cut and paste it onto the other sides. At the same time I take the head off the new skinbase I'd made and paste that on also as the old QL helmet wont suit the idea I have for the skin.

Like I said at the start I was aiming for a conanish feel for Balroq so I give him a big hunk of metal for his head haha..
Conan always wore stupid helmets that looked good but wouldnt help protect his head and the same is true here, what the helmet did do tho was make his eyes look very deep set and steep them in shadow which makes for an evil looking character and in this case an evil looking skin :)

The next step is to try and make the pads look like they are made of something more substantial than paper, when making skins you should always be thinking in terms of making realistic effects. If you are giving your skin a big pair of boots then make them look metallic and shiny, as if they would hurt, you want o have each part of the texture looking like a certain material. It is the changes in shading tone coupled with good design/colour use that make a good skin.
Anyway, they way I did the pads was easy, I simply shaded one of the squares then cut and pasted it into all the unshaded squares as shown above . The picture on the right shows the tool I use in corel photopaint which once again I will go out of my way to RECOMMEND it :)

Ths thing that is good about photopaint is that its handy if ur are clumsy and lazy (which sums up 90% of artists) , it features a multiple undo system and list as well as allowing you to leave tons of floating objects (like in the above right diag) on the picture until u decide to combine all or merely some of them. (beats photoshops irksome layer system)

I think when at this stage I becme unhappy with the look of the head, I wanted to make it more clunky and less like a joggers sweat band :)
So, after adding another metal band underneath the top one I was happier with it tho still not 100%, so I went on to the shoulder pads again whilst having a think about the head. being a QL skin it still lacked that all too familiar glowing shoulder pads. At first I just outlined the inner edge of the Pads but then I decided to cut and paste the bottom of the pads to give it a couple of smaller borders. hmm.. come to think of I probably did that because I'm always obsessed with borders and coving when making maps. But its a good example, as coving in houses is done to tidy sharp corners and add a more pleasing shape to a room, like wise I wanted a more smooth shape for the skin.

Time to get rid of the boots, they dont fit in at all with the top half, the old boots look to cyber to fit in with the rest. In keeping with the head bands I give him metallic leg straps and bind them together with a middle vertical band so they look like boots. I also added extra straps to the left shoulder pad here as I thought that the pattern was too bland. I think the thatched look is better.

Halfway through the boots I had to redo them to make them darker, they looked too bright and clashed with the rest of the skin. After making them darker I added a criss-cross of dots on the skin areas and once again added fullbright lining to the innner edge of the middle band on the boots.

After some cutting an pasting of the boots the skin is really starting to looking finished, you cant notice to well in the above pictures size but I've changed the head bands again. Only slightly tho, I merely carved out the bottom edge of the band above the eyes, I did this in the shape of where the eyebrow might have been and then highlighted it slightly. This achieved a bit more of a grimace and if u can see some emotion in the flat texture you are assured of it looking doubly so ingame as it bobs and weaves around :)

To finish up I added the traditional leg initials, but I was still unhappy with it but found that adding a beard completed the look. Prior to this the face looked a bit too oriental. The last thing I did was copy the shoulder pads over to the other sides and kick out one o balroq's teeth to complete his barbarian look. Yeah I know he dont look much like a barbarian but in the end he looks differnet from the rest and more importantly he looks like a hardnut ingame.

Now if you look back over this you will see that really I dont do a helluva lot of actual work, I basically alter about a quarter of the skin really. I did 1 boot, 1 shoulder pad and one half of the head front and back. What I DID do a lot of was actual thinking, looking and reanalysing.

In my opinion you CANT teach imagination, you CAN teach technique tho and so I would encourage you when making your skin (S) ..take your time, sit back from it often and THINK!!

Good art is 2/3 looking/thinking 1/3 drawing...

.. thats why I often bump into things when walking around haha

'Patience is a Virtue, and Artists are lazy people