Hi,
- You skin your mesh to the skeleton after you have went through the skeleton creation and placement steps and have set your rig pose. You should get a prompt at that point about automatically skin weighting the proxy mesh and the skin weight tools should appear in the ART UI. This is the point in the ART documentation: LINK
As far as not being able to see your joints, you should always be able to find them listed in the Outliner at any point in the process.
Good luck!