Thanks, Robyn and thanks for the advice.

It started off as a Multires on level 9 (anything higher and Blender became a slide show) so that I could easily 'draw' in the details (like Sculptris) but the model was much too heavy to work with so I ran it through Meshlab for quadric decimation to lower the poly count to about one fourth of what it had.

I'll give 'Set Smooth' a go and see what it does but Blender was really slowing down while trying to manipulate and paint this.

I think it's because the base material was saved as a JPEG and the base targa, created in Blender was set to 800 X 800.

The part that threw me off about texture paint was not DE-selecting my model before leaving Edit mode into Texture Paint mode which resulted in model appearing as an empty outline shape, without form, and filled in with the solid default color for the new targa I opened.

For those also learning and Googling this up, the following three tuts that I found after the fact were very well written and in depth.

[ http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/blender-basics-applying-material-texture-images.php

](http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/blender-basics-applying-material-texture-images.php)http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/blender-basics-unwrapping-uvw-maps.php

http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/textures/make-better-textures-correct-size-and-power-of-two.php