textures for me is pretty simple right now - i'm really not a good pixel pusher
the model is made in 3D Studio Max 4.26 (i'd prefer Maya, but we use Max at work) - and once i've finished a mesh i'm relatively happy with, i begin to map out basic sections by faces that need to blend together - so the main jacket front/back for snake needs to go together so i take the front faces of his body and plain map them onto a blank UV Space, i then take the rear faces of and do the same but upside down to match the top. Then i take the top his shoulder the part inbetween and map that in the same way.
The result is 3 maps all flattened to a view which need to be as a single map but not mis-shapen, so you have to keep a mental note of its shape to keep the perspective - and begin to join them up. so now it looks like i've taken the front, top and rear of his body and just layed it out like a carboard box.
From this i then shape it slightly so the sides stick out to shape it better... once happy it then export that using Texporter in a pretty high resolution, usually 1024x1024 and print it out
(if i used a tablet i probably wouldn't print it out but, i still don't have one hehee)
i then get a thin pretty poor quality peice of paper that i can see through to the UV Map i've just printed.
On that i take my time and carefully sketch out what i want the jacket to look like, once i'm happy enough i'll then scan it into Paintshop Pro (at work i'm suppose to use photo, but i paid for a copy of paint for myself at work as only i use it
)
in there I'll take some time to accentuate parts, get rid of the scan gunk ... then i'll use 3 RGB layers
first one i brush the fill colour for the area. the second layer is where i accent details with black&white airbrushing. last one is the lightmap, where i give everything character ... make it round and shadowed and such.
Then save that (as i know i'll want to use it later on in that editable state) and copy a merged version.
That is then finally placed upon the UV map and becomes what you see on the model once it is scaled down, softenly sharpened slightly from the scale bluring
also reducing colours from 24bit to 8bit 256 Octree Reduced Colour Bleeding give some nice blending effects, especially when you up the colours again and adverage blur at a high resolution then scale down
i've still alot to learn about texturing from chiq, but thank god she's a patient teacher eh
Anata aru kowagaru no watashi! 
