Skin making. Sounds like something freaky and grotesque to me. Maybe because it reminds me of Hannibal Lecter and the things that he could do.

What I meant was how to make blog skins. On an earlier post, I have reminded myself that I would give credit to the people and sites that have contributed in my skin making activities so here's a quick rundown of my essential sites when I make my skins.

The following are more technical; these are my references and my tools when I am doing my html coding.

1. W3SCHOOLS - Whenever I have doubt about my html coding or when I forget what attribute to put in a particular css, I go to this site. W3SCHOOLS have helped me a lot to become the skin maker that I am. This is where I truly learned to write html and css. As I always say, "When in doubt, log on to W3SCHOOLS!"
2. Real-Time HTML Editor - This is where I usually do all my coding because I can see how my skin would look like instantly. True to its name, you will really see the codes rendering right before your eyes. But of course, there's the good old fashioned notepad-save-ie-refresh style but this site makes life a lot easier for me.

Onto the artistic side, meaning, where I get most of my background-images, buttons, gradients, etc.

1. Wallpaper Abyss - They say "Thousands of free Wallpaper[s]" and it really is true. How wonderful to see a dizzying amount of art all in one site. I give them credit for being able to compile such a wide assortment of wallpapers.
2. GRSites - If I'm looking for gradients, banners, fonts, buttons and background textures, this is where I go. I use this mainly because of how easy it is that I remember the site name and it's easy to navigate this site. In addition to that, storage of your logo or button can actually be done on site so no problem when you get the url for the src="" of your <img> tag.
3. flickr - For my images, I use flickr most of the time because I can easily get the url for the image I want to use and it has 10MB of storage/mo so I don't get into storage space problems.
4. Here's a quick rundown of my other image online sources: DeviantArt, Flaming Text, Cool Text, Google Image Search, Yahoo and all the other search engines out there.
5. For photo editing, I use the basics like Microsoft Paint and for major alterations, Adobe Photoshop.
6. For a quick and consistent color scheme, I always use the Palette Generator from Big Huge Labs associated with flickr. Although I didn't use the Blog Header from BHL, I would also like to recommend that for a quick and no sweat blog header image.

Now, onto hosting. Of course, I wouldn't have it any other way, I put my skins on BlogSkins and you can find me there. Be my friend there and let's help other people beautify their blogs! Blogging of course is done through Blogger, although you could use other free blogging clients like WordPress, Tabulas, and LiveJournal.