four problems that may show up when customizing skins:
1) Patch 1.04 has to bee installed (no Problem)
2) There has to be a skin-folder in your darkstone directory - "skin" (not "Skin", "skins",...).
3) The modified skins have to be renamed to charactername.tga and for the face charactername_face.tga. If Darkstone doesn't find the file it uses the default-skin, if the file exists but is corrupt the character will be white all over (like a ghost).
4) The ghost problem may be solved by using the correct format for your bitmap - it has the be a 24-bit UNCOMPRESSED targa-bitmap.
The best way to create a new skin is to coulour the complete area with one coulour and then change parts of it and see how it looks. You can cut regions from the default-skin, edit it in paintshop and insert in in your new-skin-bitmap too. To see the changes run Darkstone and Paintshop parallel and use ALT+TAB - you have to reload a savegame to see the skin-changes...
hth