Minecraft – How to make part of the Minecraft skin transparent

There are two likely possibilities here.

1. You didn't colour in the head in the head region.

Minecraft skins have particular regions for particular parts of the skin. Wherever you're colouring, it's not where the head is supposed to be.

Skin-sized version:

I didn't make this reference image - only the smaller version. It's one of the most useful references I've found.

2. You didn't make the Head Accessory transparent

Here's the default Minecraft skin viewed in Photoshop zoomed in:

The limbs, body and head are fully coloured, as is required.

The head accessory - which is a box that wraps around your character's head, allowing you to give it a helmet or crown (for instance) is transparent.

It's very probable that whatever skin you're using, you've left the head accessory regions white. So now you have a white box wrapped around your character's head (not an invisible box) - so your character appears to have a white head.

Check out SkinEdit, which will let you edit and view your skin in 3D without constraints. It works for all platforms that support Java: OS X, Windows, Linux, etc.

When you download it, you'll get a JAR file, SkinEdit.jar: you should be able to just double-click on it to launch it. Once loaded, just click and drag on the model in the bottom-right corner to pan around and see your skin in action.