newb help..how to get started ?

I've been playing this game along time..although I have a million great ideas, I have no idea how to get the ideas from my head to in world. Inperticular I'm wondering how to make skins..Im a toal newb in the sence that id be starting from zip...I have gotten about as far as downloading skin templates and drawing squiggly lines on them..and looking like a really ugly catroon character..

How does one learn from scratch? I have the templates...but how do i actually learn to draw a skin? If there was a comprehensive guide to teach you from start to finish how this and other things are done that'd be great...
though i have a feeling such a thing does not exsist...back to tringo i guess

but if there is such a thing..or anyone could shed some light i would appreciate it

Hi Abby No tutorials exist because they'd be very difficult to write in a one size fits all kind of way. There are many ways to approach making skins that depend more on individual preference, what 2D or 3D paint program you're using, what you're preferred methods are in that program, and what kind of look you're going for. Here's a few tips that might help you get started...

The first thing you need to do is get very familiar with the templates and where things need to go in order to end up in the right places on the avatar. Using a 3d paint program (like the freeware app Tattoo) can help a lot, as can uploading your templates to SL, wearing them as skin textures, and taking lots of screenshots to use as reference.

Most people do painted skins. A general workflow for doing them would be to first lay down a base color (the main skintone). Then on seperate layers work on adding shadowing and highlights to suggest musculature, bone structure, and shine. How you go about painting the layers depends on what tools in your paint program you prefer to use. Generally for this type of skin you want to try and keep the seams as unmodified base color so they match up to each other.

Some of us do skins based on photographs. The workflow is somewhat similar, but starts differently. For my skins I copy areas off the photographs and warp them to fit the templates, adding each section as a different layer and blending them together with layer masks. The photo layers would take the place of the base color layer. On top of that you'd use cloning and painting to further blend it all together.

Really the biggest parts of all of it is getting familiar enough with the templates to know what to put where, and getting proficient with your paint tools. It can take a lot of experimentation and practice and there's really no shortcut for that.