Well, now I've managed to get started, at least. :-) Thanks very much for the tutorial links! It's really interesting how different the techniques are for painted maps as opposed to photo maps. I really like the look of the painted maps; some of the most beautiful and original figure textures out there are painted ones, like Ecstasy's. It gives you a lot of room for creativity.

The project I'm working on is a set of two textures, a map for V3 and one for M3. It's not likely they'll turn out to be anything too amazing, but if they're at least okay-looking I'll put them in Freestuff (or rather, I will put them on my list of things to actually finish up, put in order, get in zip files, and then put in Freestuff.) I don't think there's a free M3 texture out there yet.