I've had severe problems with social anxiety for the last few months (the results of stress from college and a nutjob of an ex girlfriend) and I'm basically stuck at home most of my time as I can't go back to college or get a job for the time being.

The last couple of months, I've been bored. I help run a minecraft community which was my little pet project but now it has quite decent support from others we've recruited so I need a new project to keep me occupied and sane.

I'm going to try to learn modding for skyrim once the CK is released but for now I would love to learn how to retexture things. Anything from small scale stuff like a simple weapon retexture and eventually learn how to retexture skins and armors or even whole buildings.

Anyone got any advice on where I can learn and start off?

A list of guides and programs I will need would be nice.

(I'm absoloutely skint - result of not being able to get a job - so free programs only please )

Just start goggling and look into TesNexus Skyrim site and see how they do this. Much more informative information there for this stuff. I have been curious on how someone did the "detailed faces". It looks much better then vanilla. But look up Skyrim Nexus in google.

Most likely Blender and GIMP (or Photoshop if you own it)

I have looked on nexus and seen some of the mods and stuff but I svck at finding information on my own lol I always find a tutorial that will lead me so far then get lost and lose what I was looking at ect. Plus I never know which tutorials are good and which are giving me rubbish advice, hence why I'd love for someone to give me some information and point me to their personal preferences on tutorials and such

you're gonna need Photoshop or GIMP
aswell as a DDS plugin for each one:

http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop
http://code.google.com/p/gimp-dds/

and you're gonna want to learn how to use all the features in each program using tutorials youtube it's how i learnt.

also, for browsing quickly:
http://www.irfanview.com/
and install:
http://www.irfanview.com/

you should be set, you just need to learn how to use the programs really.

I've used gimp a bit in college for editing forensic photo's but never for texture editing, this could be painful lol

And I've never even heard of the irfanview before, thanks for that link

Retexturing for Skyrim is going to use similar (if not identical!) techniques as retexturing in Oblivion. There's a more-or-less complete guide to retexturing Oblivion here: http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Portal:Texturing

Have fun, and do share your creations here and on skyrimnexus.com!