The Flag - Most of my textures are actually photographs taken with my digital camera and then tweaked and resized in Paintshop Pro....aside from a couple of textures which were hand drawn using PSP again.
With character modelling, which I'm going to have to get started on soon, I suspect that I'll have to use hand-drawn textures....which I'm not looking forward to because my 2D art skills are not all that and because my texturing skills are not great yet either.

Still....anything good that comes out will be posted and I'll *have* to do this stuff because a game without characters will be pretty dull

I've still got several static models to do yet, so I'll probably finish those before starting on the character models.
I'm no expert (the above are all my models to date), but I reckon that any 2D paint package would be fine for 2D texturing. If I had to recommend a package it would be Photoshop....which is big bucks (I'm saving up some cash for it) or Paint Shop Pro (not sure how much this is as I'm using a version 4 special edition that was given away on a coverdisk about five years ago).
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