In late January, I decided to finally revisit skinning. I had for long been contemplating doing a zombie dragon skin, and after begging everyone else to do it first (I still do that for the record (^: ) I decided to try my hand at it myself.


Zombie Dragon - posted the 30th of January

For the zombie dragon skin, I vouched for not touching the colour editing tools in paint.net and went for handpicking most colours, at this given time I also sometimes used a transparency pencil tool, to smoothen out some of my palettes, most notably this is the case on the back of the skin, where you can see a lot of similar colours neighbouring one another. As you heavily associate green with something decomposing, I decided to have my shadows of each colour heavily dip into green. The skin's composition utilises a split component, where you make sure each side is different from one another. This leads to some additional chaos, that a zombie definitely gains from. Overall for this skin I was actually quite happy with it. What you might notice is how linear the head is compared to the rest of the skin, which creates a weird gap between the head and torso. The issue is remarkable around the eyes, that really lose the organic feeling, due to being so angular. Overall, this skin served as a great way of derusting my skillset and introducing a newer colour style to my skins.

The next two skins I posted were both older skins, that I had created long ago: One was the collab with ThatGuyJake and the other being the Eos skin.

Eos - posted the 31st of January

For Eos, I wanted the skin to represent the dawn, as the greek myth of Eos was a heavy inspiration. The usage of purples for shadows throughout the skin was to heavily enhance the contrast. The gradient for the dress closely resembles what I did for my skin reality distortion from mid 2017.

The collab with thatguyjake, the red robot, was primarily an experiment with advanced designs, where I tried to get the hang of how he did things - Jake can much better explain the thoughts behind this skin than I.


Living colour - posted the 1st of February

Finishing off this 3 day streak of skins, I posted the living colour skin. This skin was an old idea I had - I wanted to make an embodiment of nature. For this skin I changed my colouring slightly once again. I wanted to utilise what I called "colour compensation" (which is just a fancy term for making sure each primary colour is somewhat present). By having the primary colour for the skin be blue, green and brown - with the feet dipping into orange and yellow and every shadow landing itself in purple, I could accomplish having a very vivid skin, without cluttering the skin with elements that would've made it messier than it had to be. For this skin I avoided using graytone hue shifting as much as possible, to create a more vivid colour scheme. This I think worked, but it also perhaps made the green slightly gooey. If I were to ever revisit this skin it would definitely be what I would be looking out for. The giant flower in the back of the head is my own take on a very old ScarletBox design: They use a more wide and perhaps more realistic setup for a flower, but as I was running short on space I could not afford to make mine nearly as big.

This first period of skinning culminated in one skin: my 10th contest winner. I won't go much in depth with this one, as much of it is described on the skin itself. But this was a huge moment for me this year, as I had long wanted to break the 2 digit wins barrier. The robot skin contest entry I submitted in 2018 had placed 8th, which was a huge disappointment, mostly in myself for not delivering stronger, so proving to myself I still got it was fantastic.

Bending the concept of reality - posted the 17th of February

I won't go into too much into detail with these skins, I'd rather talk about probably the most defining event for me this year. The Awesome Sonic Series. The Awesome Sonic Series was something I had long wanted to do, at least the thought of taking the entire trending over with a skin type, that didn't involve a single teen skin. The fantastic part was that from getting this idea, this only took a week to set up and execute. Taking trending was a long as hard battle, but due to careful planning and an amazing yield of high quality skins, we did indeed manage to do it.

I want to shoutout everyone in my discord server for this happening, it was fantastic and I am glad you could help me get it done!!

The Awesome Sonic Series - the 10th of March.

If you want to discover further, what happened I'd recommend checking out wall posts from around this time, as well as reading about it on a skin or check the collection for it out!


The Awesome Sonic Series taught me a lot about what I enjoyed with the planetminecraft community. Coming together and creating this effort to live a common goal, was incredibly fun - as it really felt like everyone was in it together. Planetminecraft events, where people plan stuff out to reach a common goal is commonly either friendly competition or small collab work, which doesn’t hold the same weight to it as this humongous plan did, so this effort felt a bit like a huge project that a build team would perhaps do, just for skins. Especially when we finally pulled the trigger on posting the skins, the celebrations and the hype was outstanding.

Following the Awesome Sonic Series, I decided I wanted to try out two things: I wanted to keep trying out making skins based on reference pictures, something that I had much neglected coming into the year, and I wanted to go back to colouring and vibing for skins, that expressed something more than just "this looks cool".

This came to fruition, first and foremost, with the release of my Touka skin.

Touka Kirishima - posted the 14th of March

For Touka, I first and foremost found a reference picture, which you can find in the description of the skin. This allowed me to have a predetermined base for what I was going for. Coming into the skin, I was well aware of two things: How stupidly difficult the Kagune was going to be and how important it was getting the right colours for this. I'll start out with colouring:

Touka, at least in the early manga, has a tendency to be quite cold, I wanted this skin to reflect that. The first and foremost colours I associate with this coldness are purple and blue. So as a start I wanted every colour to dip into blue in the shadows. Doing it in the highlights could potentially work, and was done for the hair. But this would be against the theory of colour depth, that is utilised commonly in art. Therefore I vouched against that and went for blue/purple shadows. To make sure the blue stood out in the shadows, I desaturated the earlier colours for my shadows and then took the saturation for the blue way high. This allows the heavier blue to dominate the shadows, without it looking like two different planes. It creates a smooth transition! A thing to remember here, is that when you do blue shadows, it can be nice to have your highlights or main colours dip into a warmer tone - much art is defined through its contrast! This was what I did for the red, skin tone and shirt colour. For the skirt and hair I wanted to keep it overall cold.

The Kagune, I would probably have done slightly differently today than back then, as I much later experimented with translucent hat layering that potentially could have benefitted this skin greatly. None-the-less the first thing that I was going to have to do, was to make it stand out from the rest. This was done with heavy shadows in the periphery of the kagune. This would contrast heavily to the shirt tone. The red highlights would then contribute the classic look of the kagune, that the reference picture also depicted.

These considerations once again played into the following skin:


Excitement - posted the 30th of March

For this skin, I do describe the choices in the skin description. But to give a quick summary: Red tones are usually the ones associated with excitement, according to google, and by depicting a childlike cartoony adventure, I think I gave the viewer a good shot at understanding exactly what the character was feeling. Perhaps apart from excitement this skin touches upon wonder, determination, as kindly pointed out by dinowcookie and curiousness.

Following excitement, I made two less than stellar skins. Not that they were bad, but they each suffered some flaws I want to talk about, what I make of it, and what I learnt from that.

The king of lions - posted the 20th of April

This skin at its core I think is great - the challenge, set by Wildcard_Gamer, was to make a skin exclusively using yellow and green tones. This meant that I would lack colder tones, that can be very important for creating depth and contrast. To compensate for this, I utilised a common visual gimmick or perhaps illusion, that is, if you place a greytone next to a saturated colour, the grey tone will take the tone of the complementary contrast to the saturated colour. This allowd the shadows to be a bit more vivid, than the challenge would initially led you to believe was possible.

This is all very clever, and design is also alright. My issue with this skin was what I'd call design and shading inconsistencies. Particularly between the head and the legs. The head is a very line-y business with a lot of attention to detail and a wide array of colours to make sure I encaptulate the mood I wanted, even if the skin could only utilise certain tones of hue. The legs are much simpler and lack that "oompf" that really makes them fit with the rest. This issue actually also goes for the arms, it's just not as prevalent. So while this certainly can't be classified as a slump skin, it'll certainly indicate some of what was to come for the next skin.


Mega Charizard X - posted the 5th of May.

The second skin project has arrived, the theme is pokemon, and I was doing mega charizard X. This skin has loads of issues - which I definitely learnt from. The first issues should be apparent: The tail has no glow, it's very static and falls flat for that reason, the head is improperly proportioned and shaded, and makes it look way too huge and not like charizard. The blue on the torso seems to just be a surface of its own, due to the shadows I placed around it, which leads to poor transitioning and cohesion and the back of the head and the wings have a styling inconsistency with the rest of the skin, which makes it lack in various aries, most notably lighting and how cohesive the skin is throughout.

Perhaps a less obvious to the immediate eye, is that the colouring is a much bigger issue than all of that. Because while the other issues make the skin worse in areas, the colours are throughout the whole skin. In my opinion, the colouring I went for, with saturating the highlights in a blue area. Initially this was done to make the transition into the lighter blue tone, particularly the spikes on the shoulders, much better. But it sadly had a different effect, and made the entire skin feel a bit like plastic to me. Which is a shame, as I think this one had potential and just didn't at all make it... ):

While doing this skin, I was preparing for a marketplace HD skin pack, and that will play a role in the next part of 2019!

Prior to making this following HD skin pack, my HD skin style had very much been a gradient and definitely less desirable product, as it just didn't really feel that nice to look at imo. For this skin pack, I decided to do something differently. I wanted to utilise what I knew of pixel art technique, inventive thinking and colours that would pop the best I could. The following is the product:

Elemental knights - released by Pixel Squared, to be found on the minecraft marketplace.


Doing this pack brought me out of my slump immediately, as I very much found new things I wanted to try out, and had also opened up my eyes for more elemental and colour themed skins. What this primarily taught me, was that my colour count for my charizard skin was way too high compared to what it needed to be, or perhaps distributed improperly. I didn't need all those colours to make pillows etc. because by cutting slightly down on how many colours I always used, I could greatly enhance my ability to adapt to designs and to not be too bound by whatever style I was going with. This led to the next skin, that I want to go very much in depth with. It's time for the big 100!


Heart of the forest - posted the 5th of July

I think if you asked most people, which skin of mine defined my 2019 on planetminecaft, most would definitely point to this one, and I would be inclined to agree. This is probably the skin where I did the most right in 2019. Therefore I think we should try to analyze it, and see what works so well for this one.

The idea: The idea for this skin is quite original. I had long wanted to make a spirit of the forest skin, but decided when that proved to just not look up to par, to go with something else that could represent a forest's spirit equally well. The back of the skin was later added, props to aspirin, I think it was, for suggesting this particular layout, although it could also have been someone else.

You might think I started with the "heart" based on the information, and while you would be semi-correct that I started with the lightsource, the first things I actually had proper drafts for was the vines sorrounding it.

Early drafts for Heart of the forest

I think what one immediately spots in the draft, was how many stages and variations I had of the front. Even what is seen in the latter draft, is not what at all ended up on the finalised version of the skin. This is important, as I think something that defines what makes this skin special is its experimental features and willingness to go into unknown territories. The skin is composed of many many experiments that ended at the final version in the end.


Later drafts/attempts at the front of the skin.

The shading: Much like the wanderer skin I made previously, the shading utilises an on skin lightsource. This gives a very cool effect, that makes the skin super immersive and makes it almost feel like it could stand on its own, without any context. Where Heart of the forest surpasses the wanderer skin, is in its ability to never go same-y. The back of wanderer was 100% dark, a symptom of the on skin lightsource. By utilising two, and also differently coloured, lightsources, heart of the forest does not have the same stale face as wanderer. This allows for every bit of heart of the forest to be interesting and definitely very different from one another.

The colouring: By using a secondary lightsource, that isn't on the skin, but more of a backlight, in a blue tone, heart of the forest manages to balance three main colours in its highlights: Blue, red and yellow, while the skin being prodominantly green. This means that the two colour triangles of RGB and BRY are both present in the skin. The shadows are made to contrast heavily to both, and therefore provide a solid backdrop, that makes everything stand out, and perhaps shine a bit, like it was perhaps at night. The red lightsourcing on the back particularly proves vital, as it gives the skin two completely different vibes depending which way you look at it, which is a central part of what makes the skin great - the duality.

One thing, that you however must also accept is, that this skin doesn't have the same capabilities as a character skin as most other skin I've submitted, which means that it perhaps will not work to as great of an effect in-game. A small price to pay in this case, but definitely something to keep in mind!

With what I learned from the heart of the forest and the HD skinning, I decided to make some more skins, where I kept colouring in mind to the same level as I did with the previous skin. This yielded some great results:

Final Battle - posted the 6th of August

Baneslayer Angel - posted the 20th of August

Both of those utilise similar techniques as previously described, where colour and mood is kept in mind. I did decide to try to use the layering way more than I ever had before, something that will be a recurring theme throughout the rest of the skins.

The real meat of this time, would however, have to be the collab skin I did with Bureine, a skin that I think is the most clever thing I've thought of, and Bureine did an outstanding job performing it with me!

Hero of tomorrow's world - posted the 3rd of september.

This skin was something else, the whole concept of doing a collab skin stage wise like this, I think it unprecedented and I feel like, perhaps apart from my contributions of HD skin designing, is some of the hopefully more eye-opening things I did this year.

The rules I described on the skin, so perhaps I should rather try to explain my thoughts on what this skin does so well:

When I think collab skins, the first two things that come into mind are frankenskins, where you divide a skin into clear cut sections and distribute those among the participants for kinda stitchy end result, the other one is where one person designs a skin base, and the other shades it. Both of these collab styles are tried and succeeded at time and time again. So I wanted to do something else. The issue that those collab skins have, is that the workload isn't very evenly placed, and that the skins aren't very fluent. you can't really go for much beyond the restrictions placed upon what you're given. This collab blows that restriction out of the window!


This becomes obvious once you see the gif, where you can see that you can elect to do any part of the skin at any given moment, you just have to spend enough "turns" going for it, for you to finish it. This means that this is a very free collab style, that allows for a lot of creative freedom, that the other simply can't replicate well. Most notably is the ability to develop what someone else has already done. As you can not overwrite previous parts, you will end up having to adapt, a lot, to what is given to you at specific times. This is very interesting and different from the situations previously described, where you only work within the boundaries of a part of a design. Here you choose your part, you choose your design, you just have to accept that you have to also make sure what you want to do fits what the other collaborants want! This I think is what sets this apart from the rest.

This next session I want to cut short. I don't think it's that interesting and it mostly includes palette challenge skins, and thoughts earlier described.

Sunset knight - posted on 27th of September

This is the skin that was featured on minecraft.net, which is very cool, and definitely something I consider an achievment of mine this year. The issue is that this skin is over a year old, and doesn't really fit in well with the rest. The thought behind this skin was a challenge allergy_man set me. To use a red-only lightsource. This is a bit of a difficult thing to do, as the human eye isn't very sensitive to red, and therefore a red ultra bright highlight, will actually not really shine that much. Therefore doing armour becomes very difficult, as you want the contrast for the metal, to really be a defining aspect of the skin. Another thing with red, is that it very quickly stops being obviously red, and becomes orange or a diluted red colour. I'd recommend trying to think ahead with your palette, and how much contrast you at maximum can achieve with your palette, before you go for an attempt!


Rainy days - posted on the 12th of October

This skin was a colour experiment, basically I wanted to try to make a yellow jacket, that wasn't overpowering. To do this I added green and desat purple to the shadows, to thereby achieve a more organic tone to the skin, as yellow quickly becomes metal-y or plastic-y, which this skin also has a tendency to do in places. To make sure the rain vibe was present throughout the skin, I used a variation highlight colour, that was more a desat blue. This way I could achieve the cold wet feeling, even on the jacket, at least that was the intent. The hair follows a same logic, it's just without the variation highlight tone.


Anhedonia - posted on the 7th of November

Anhedonia is something I for long wanted to portray on a skin - similar to the skies of tomorrow skin I made for the light vs dark contest, this was going to try to express something with a lightsource. The initial idea was for everything to be gray, as anhedonia is a depression that is defined by the inability of experience pleasure of any kind. I wanted the head to be light, to express that the mind is still active. In hindsight, this is the wrong approach, and should've been done the complete other way around. With a grey head, and everything else being a "normal" tone. This, I think would much better express what I was going for, and is something I brought with me into later considerations. The head is not very well executed, sadly, it has some saturation issues (particularly the back of the head) as well as just seeming too chunky to me.

With the return of Lunatique, a spark of great skins and a lot of motivation, I decided to spend a week derusting my skinning once again. This week would prove to be different from others, as I had set out to produce at least one skin per day.
I will not go much into detail with some of these skins, as I don't think they actually are that interesting - as making a skin per day will dillute your quality slightly.


Komachi Onozuka - Posted the 10th of November

Komachi is an interesting skin for a few reasons. Let's analyze!
The design: Komachi's design is very cluttered with elements, including clothing in several layers and some widely different colours going on. Perhaps notably, is that komachi's design builds upon a heavy contrast different between the blue and every other part, particularly the hair tone has some great contrast to the blue tone. This makes for a very distinct visual, where you want to make sure the colour style is still cohesive, even if the contrast is there. There is also a huge risk for blending between parts near the belt area. There is a lot of discussion on whether blending is good. In this case however, it 100% is bad. Komachi's design demands distinct layering and clothing, as it's one of her very recognisable aspects. Blending would ruin this part her design, and therefore reduce the quality of the skin. I particularly found the orange textile to have a tendency to blend with the white and the belt. Thereby being a tough colour to work with.

Colour cohesion: To make sure each colour stuck well together, I tried to keep the polar regions of each ramp similar. Blue shadows, yellow or desat highlights. This was what I was looking for in conjunction with the design, to make sure I got a good replication of Komachi's design, while not having parts clash with each other.

Shading: Universal lighting, with a slight tendency to prioritise lighting from above, which means there will be shadows below protruding areas!


Apocalypse survivor - posted the 10th of November

This skin I tried to go for a colour style that would make the skin seem slightly dusty. I actually think this part of the skin was accomplished: What I did not achieve was to give it that wow factor, that it so longed after. I discovered here that to get something dusty, yellow is perhaps the most useful colour.


Elvish Mystic - Posted the 13th of November.

This skin is also very interesting to analyse, as it includes a lot of elements that help make the skin cohesive, despite the incredible amount of total colours. So let's take a quick look at what I learnt here:

Colouring: By having the shadows in green and purple I could create a strong complementary contrast, that is the primary defining contrast throughout this skin. If you pay mind, this particular trait, of shadows being in green/blue and purple is the thing each palette has similar, as well as having highlights in yellow. Another thing that each palette has in common, is that the basetone (the midtone) is very desaturated compared to the shadows and highlights. Using a desat midtone, allows for a lot of initial hueshifting, as the effect of changing a huge at a low saturation is miniscule compared to that of a higher saturation. This is how I allowed myself to do as much hue shifting as I did. Another thing to keep in mind, is that despite it not being a part of the skin, I tried to incorporate red into the palettes as well, at least the skin tone. This is to make sure every colour is represented on the skin, so every colour is touched upon. This is similar to what I thought of with "living colour", just taken to the extreme.

I think this is the most interesting part of the skin. Shading uses dithering for the fur, and there is a lightsource on the skin as well, that is very much also influenced by the colouring.


Demonic Priest - posted the 15th of November

Demonic priest is a good lesson in keeping your entire skin interesting: Not so much because demonic priest does that very well though. Demonic priest suffers from what I call the leg syndrome. It should come as no surprise that I really don't like skinning legs. This skin suffers for it. The torso, arms and head are all super packed with details and colour, whereas the legs are void of any of that, instead vouching for a simpler style that I honestly find to be a slight disconnect from the rest of the skin.


Kanna Kamui - posted the 16th of November

This skin is not super interesting. In its essense you could take what I wrote for Touka, and convert that text to describe what this does. I do however want to mention the recurring pink and purple shadows, that prove to be essential for this skin's vibe, definitely something to take away from this, that much of a skin's vibe can be put in its shadows. Perhaps a bit contrary to what most people would assume.


Rampage - Posted the 17th of November.

contrary to how complex this may look, I don't think the analysis for this one is going to be that interesting:

Colours: This skin has a basic blue vs red colour scheme, to enable a smooth transition between the two I did two things: Used colours from either side on the other one and used the old grey-tone shifting as previously mentioned, to make sure the highlights transition seamlessly. I think this skin is a good example of a smooth transition while still keeping the contrast. You could perhaps call it purpose-full blending, as the blending is the entire gimmick of the skin. I'd recommend downloading and looking at this skin yourself, or asking me in the comments, if you have further questions for this skin.

I think overall this skin was a ton of fun to make, it was very difficult - which is a tendency with my best skins, that they indeed are the most difficult to make too. I think with this skin, it was the first time in a while, I realised how difficult it is to improve my style much further, without drastically changing something. This has of course happened before, but it feels like I am truly reaching a point, where it's expected I do something crazy each time I post, and that makes skinning a bit more taxing. At least I'll continue as long as it's fun.

Weekly skinning was incredibly rewarding, as you can see in my analysis, I learnt a lot, but I am also glad I don't post daily otherwise, I think I'd quickly dillute my per skin quality to make sure I can keep posting, which I am not interested in. This week was assisted in the sense that I had a storage/stash of old finished skins, that I could post if I ever wanted to skip on a day.

In 2018, several people told me, that I did not understand teen skinning - which I honestly found doubtful. So I set out on my journey as a teen skinner on an alt account Octoqtie, that would make sure the skins I posted wouldn't be associated to my name immediately. Even if people suspected that it was indeed me posting, I appreciated the ability for people to judge my skins without immediately associating my name to it.

On said account, I experimented with common teen skin gimmicks:

La vie en rose - posted the 17th of March

Made as a joke, but can be counted as an experiment in doing the ombre hairstyle. This hairstyle seem to be popular amongst teen skinners, and therefore it was nice giving it a proper go. I decided to make octoqtie's style high saturation, to contrast to the usual very diluted "pastel" style.


Momu's reshade contest - submitted the 18th of March

Rainbow hat was a nice way of getting the hang of higher saturation blending (:

In total, octoqtie won 2 reshade contests, and got over 100 subscribers - a good time to announce this, isn't it? I think this proves I do in fact know my teen skins (^:

I held two palette contests, one will soon be judged and the other one is finished. I just want to say thank you for entering. In my original list of goals I wanted to hold a contest with over 50 entries, which somehow happened this year, and for that I am grateful (: