Minecraft Skin Bases and Templates

A base is a starting point, not a finished skin: a body with skin tone, basic shading and often a hair shape, left deliberately plain so you can draw your own outfit onto it. Starting from a base saves the hardest part of making a skin, which is getting the face and the arm shading to look right.

Open any base below, download the PNG and edit it in any image editor that preserves transparency — the alpha channel is what makes the hat and jacket overlay layers work. Keep the canvas at its original size; scaling a 64×64 skin up to 128×128 in an editor does not make it HD, it just blurs it.