About 4 years ago I was just getting into "skinning", and was so impressed by the skins and themes that people were making. Although I was a little intimidated at first, that didn't stop me from attempting my first skinning project which was making a cursor for CursorXP.
If I remember correctly I was using a trial version of Photoshop, and with a little help from the community I finished my first project which was Bakardi for CursorXP.
I used to make visual styles (WB skins) but my talent is just not up there.
Occasionally I'll get to see Mormegil or Treetog's source files for their skins and I realize just how out of my league they are. Dozens of layers, etc.
Back when I got started, I ported Kaleidoscope themes from the Mac. Later on, I started making my own, pixel-art-level skins.
An eFX skin in '98, '99 or so. It was goddamn awful.
I'm rather short on time these days (read: I hate computers with a vengeance and prefer to waste my time in other ways than sitting behind a screen), so I only skin apps I use daily, have visible skinnable/themeable and are fast to skin.
In practice, that means that these days I run my own LiteStep theme, made an existing visual style even darker and use a somewhat customisable console replacement called "console".
The only truly skinnable app I really use (at work that is), is ColorPad. Perhaps I should make a new skin for it some day.
I first started with just a new wallpaper and this samurize system monitor. I posted it here but it;s been deleted now. 2 years later and I have progressed a lot.
I made it from the absolute zero; I didn´t work very well with Photoshop, I didn´t have any template skin to guide me through, so it´s... a little bad and unfashioned. I didn´t publish it in other sites.
