Skulldog (or as you may know her, 12th) donated this very useful tutorial on how she works in Painter, which includes what I consider an excellent section on textures.. You can see some of her art at DeviantART and at Skulldog.net.

	There's no right way to use Painter, and any one way can be easy or hard depending on the person using it. This is a guide to how I do my Painter work. I'm not sure if this guide will work for Painter 5, 7, or 8. You can try, but please don't email asking about how to do this in anything other than 6. Anything I plan to color in Painter, I'll draw only in blue pencil. Why? it just scans nicer, and keeps me from having sharp black edges in the final. However, it's not necessary to do this. You can work with pencil art, inked art, whatever. Something that you will need to do, is scan the file much larger than you want the picture to be. I work 3500 x 4000 or bigger, usually. If you can see the whole picture on screen, you are working too small. Let's take this file into painter 6 now. I'm zoomed out to 33%, just to give an idea how large I'm working. .
	So what's going on here? I'm using the Watercolor tool, with Large simple water to cover the whole picture red. Then using darker and lighter shades of the same color to start blocking in the highlights and shadows. This is only a test layer, so don't worry about being neat or even staying in the lines. Watercolor in Painter 6 stays under all linework, which is a nice feature to start out with.
	Full screen, that's about all of the picture I can see. This size lets me work on details without loosing them when I size it down for the web. You can also see how sloppy my test colors are. From here, I switch to Dry Canvas. (Top bar > Canvas> Dry) Then I start using Oil paints. The picture shows I'm using 'Ultrafine Wash Brush', and you can get a idea where my slider settings are.
	Oil pant goes right over everything, unlike the watercolor, so be careful to leave a little where you want the lines to be, or use a smaller brush to draw them afterwards. After you have a solid area, start adding in darker colors like the picture above. I don't mind leaving a little bit of the test color showing, it gives a nice variation at the end.
	And finally some highlights. Noticed it's not white at all. See the control box, I'm using a pink. This will make the final white areas stand out much more.
	I've fully filled the whole picture at this point. Here's a detail that shows how little you really have to do to make this look good. I've only used three colors for the shirt, and even left areas with the under red. Once zoomed out, it looks almost finished.
	While things look pretty good already, details really kick the picture into the finished stage. I use a bunch of different tools to add different types of details. Play around with what you like best, and don't feel stuck with only what I say. First, Chalk is my number one tool for details. I used it here to outline the eyes, and bump up the mouth lines. Sharp chalk works well for outlining, and highlighting hair. Square chalk and Large chalk are good shading large areas, and laying out texture. Oil Pastel makes a nice smooth shade, I use it for scales, metal, and eyes.
	Another good tool is airbrush. I keep the opacity very low, so it's not so glaring. I added a little white to the tip of the nose, and cheeks here.
	Working with an oil paint base is good, if you don't like something, just re-select the base color and start over. I noticed the mouth looked a little off, so I just covered it with Ultrafine wash brush and redrew the mouth. Here, I use the smudge tool to smooth out details in the face.
	It's little details that add life. I used the Sharp chalk to add a few little lines to the edge of the ears here, doesn't look like much up close, but zoomed out, it adds some nice highlights.
	Something I get asked a lot is, how to make eyes look more realistic. I'll go into this a little. First, remember eyes are round, shade them with this in mind. Also, use as little pure white as possible. Gray and off white colors work better. I used pink with a little gray there. I've taken the Sharp chalk and added in a brighter yellow around the pupil and the edges.
	Added a little off white now, and a black center. Note how the highlight actually goes over the pupil.
	After eyes I move onto hair. For the most part, I just add a few streaks here and there, following the shape of the head. Using the Ultrafine wash brush to pull out some lighter colors can be useful too.
	Let's do some texture now. Here's the shirt again from before, now I've added in a few sharp chalk marks.
	Mixing in layers of square chalk, sharp chalk, oil pastel and gritty charcoal. Vary the colors as well, just have fun.
	After I've gotten a good variety of color, shapes, and patterns, I'll lay down a light coat of square chalk, to give it a last texture. I've also used the sharp chalk to add in a few details, like stitching.
	Once I've done everything, the only thing left is to add a background. The red seemed a bit bright for me, so I changed it to orange here. I use the Ultrafine wash bush again to carefully go around the whole picture. I left a little outline of red for fun.
	To round out the Scratchboard rake tool to cut the bottom edge of the characters off.
	The finished product.