There are two parts in the MagicShape skins: Background and Mask. You can use any bitmap image as your background, even your own pictures. Following is one background image used in the UseSkin sample:
Masks are used to carve out portions of the background you like. It will deside the shape of your application. The black portion of the mask represent the portion you want to keep. Following is the mask for the above background:
Important: The name of the mask should be derived from the name of background image. Lets say you save the background image as "background.bmp" the mask should be called "background_mask.bmp". Otherwise it will not work!!!
MagicButton skins are a combination of five bitmaps: Mask, Up(or Normal), Down(or Selected), Focused and Disabled. You need exact five bitmaps and five bitmaps have to follow exact sequence(i.e Mask, UP, Down, Focused, Disabled). Following is one of the skin in UseSkin sample
There are lots of tools out there that will help you create skins for MagicShape and MagicButton: on the higher end you can use PhotoShop, on the lower end you can use PaintShop Pro etc.