An Introduction to Skinning
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A full overview of the Skinning skill and its perks can be found in the Skill Compendium located here.
Getting Started
All that's needed to start gathering resources from dead beings is proper equipment. You can use either a Hatchet or a Skinning Tool, although each tool has its advantages: the Hatchet is versatile, given you can chop trees and recover deeded items in your house with it; the Skinning Tool, on the other hand, allows you to skin dead creatures without equipping the tool on the paperdoll which provides less mouse effort overall. Choose what suits you best.
A sideline alternative is using a bladed weapon to skin a corpse, but that's detrimental to the weapon's durability as opposed to spending uses from the tools mentioned above. Thus, this might not be the preferable approach except when using weapons of lower quality that would otherwise be simply discarded.
Harvesting Process
When you double-click your tool of choice and select a fresh corpse, a gump similar to the following will appear:
<PICTURE OF SKINNING CORPSE GUMP HERE>
You'll notice that the list of skinnable parts comes in a few colors, depending on the character's skill with this Talent. Items shown in green are guaranteed to yield the part when skinned, yellow means the character has a chance of getting it and red is currently beyond that character's skill level. The more skill a character has the more items in green will show and a higher chance to obtain yellow resources.
Skinning a corpse requires standing close to the dead body, and each attempt takes a few seconds. Every successful attempt will produce the corresponding resource inside the corpse gump, while a failed attempt yields nothing. Either way, once selected, the resource clicked disappears from the skinning gump (i.e. a resource cannot be skinned for a second time for the same corpse if the character was unsuccessful in the first try).
Note: most of the Skinning mechanics aforewritten can be modified by purchasing perks.
Finally, skinning a corpse deducts one use of the tool used regardless of how many parts are skinned. For instance, if a character attempts to remove the meat, beak and feathers from a dead bird, it still only deducts 1 use from the tool, instead of a point for each resource skinned.