A little skin help!

Alright, so this doesnt relate to Second Life at all, but I couldn't think of a better place to ask the question.
I just started working on a personal project in photoshop, my first attempt at a digital painting based on actual picture. However, the skin ( and a few other things ) is lacking. Seeing as how many fabulously made skins com about here, I assume it's safe to ask: How does one add detail to the base? What I've come up with its very basic and plain and I dont know where to add. Any suggestions?

Heres my (unfinished) piece. I hope this works...

One thing that I am noticing right away that will improve the realism of your image is the use of less obvious lines unless you use lines sylisticly (Go to www.murraytinkelman.com and you will see some excellent examples of stylistic line drawings). Any hard edges in RL are not lines but transitions in light & shadow, color, opacity, etc. While it is nice to use lines as a guide in constructing the image, it is better to use color and shading as a means of defining edges, folds, and other transitions. Also, pay close attention to proportions - head, shoulders, and hands especially in this drawing. You have an advantage over traditional paint in the sense that you can remove one layer without affecting another layer. Use Photoshop layers to your advantage. I hope that helps.

I used to paint with a traditional airbrush and acrylic paints. I would work hundreds of hours on a single image with very little margin for error. I could not remove some mistakes, or build too much paint over others without altering the image significantly. Now I paint mostly in the digital format because it is so forgiving

Get Dave Nagel's brushes and peruse his tuturial on skins-- wicked.

http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=31082

Ah! Thanks Namssor and Jezebel! I shall be looking into the links in detail. I have seen that page before, Jezebel, I just havnt payed close attention, shame on me.

As for the proportions...yes I noticed the head is small, shoulders are broad... I'm just now looking into the hands.

Better get back into Photoshop, thanks again!

add contrastier darker shadows, use diffrent colors other then variations of peach, like add in a little red or if you're going for dramatic maybe something like blue

Blue, huh? I'm pretty new to this so... as lighting, tiny tint or....?

yeah as a highlight, or mix it in wherever you feel like it

You could also try adding uniform noise to the skin.
If done right, it can make the skin seem more textural without making it seem grainy.

Just a thought.

Shadows/shade will always have a little bit of a cool tone to them, a small amount of blue, purple or green. Put a small shadow with a fairly hard edge to it where the clothing would cast a shadow logically... that can sometimes add a huge amount of a depth to the image. Hope that helps!