i use:

1. photoshop
1.1. texmex
1.2. wally

2. id and other custom textures as a base

3. summon kell 

And a complete answer would take too much time for me to write it right now...but i'll be back. (Maybe.) 

3. summon kell

That's the most important step. 

I tested textures creation for my next map... and I found it really easy to create... even if my first tries were really crappy... :/

I used ULead Pals2Go image editor (this is a morphing tool witch allow very cool deformation) and PhotoShop.

I started from photos (for animated texture as well)..

I created the wad file from bmp file, and I'm not sure it's the appropriate image format to ensure a good texture quality..

Basically, the only problem I found was the difficulty to anticipate size matching between textures and brushes.. before their usage in mapping editor... It was a little bit tricky for me... 

definatly Kell. 

a real answer to this thread!?

Rorshach wrote a bunch of tutorials detailing his method of texturing and other such game art, all on his site in the 'help' section.

http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/rorshach/

This'll be a good place to start. There used to be some tuts Fingers wrote, I'll try and locate them. 

I tried some textures, by changing existing ones. The only crap I met was the dark gamma in which the Q1 textures are.

Another strange attitude was the importing of animated textures. They need the +name_0 account, which I couldn't obtain in WinXP.
Win98 didn't had a problem with it. 

In WinXP, just give your texture files any filename, then rename them once you've imported them in TexMex. 

um... i don't know what kind of winxp you've got, but i can use +0name.* just fine... 

heard of it, but never knew TexMex. Will download as soon as possible.

I saw these two, and I couldn't leave them, after retexturing.
http://members.home.nl/gimli/machine.qme 

Thanks for the link it's really interesting ! Sure it will help me to improve my own textures... 

I believe they were taken down due to space limitations on their server. 

Reading the mapping help thread posts from 2015 I seen Kinn mentioning some tool with the ability to "paint reliefs" with an indexed palette; anyone know if it was ever released?
http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=4&start=15415 

Ah yes - "Brownstrokes".

I wrote Brownstrokes yonks ago as part of a toolkit I made at work in Unity3D, so not public domain sadly.

I really want to rewrite it one day as a standalone tool using SDL. Very unlikely to happen in the short term though because too many other things on my list.

However, as per the post you linked, I decided the "realistic" 3d-renderey look to the textures lacked painterly charm, so went 100% hand drawn in the end. 

Ah okay, no worries. Have been searching out and testing a lot of tools looking for good indexed editing.. This guys GIMP 2.9 build is stable on windows
http://samjcreations.blogspot.co.uk/
, and works pretty good with the indexed palette when blending. New warp tool and symmetry painting is awesome too. 

Thanks for the link, ww. 

http://www.insideqc.com/pixatool-now-supports-the-quake-palette/ 

Nice! I had to pass up previous versions because the lack of custom palette support. 

he added the quake palette, not custom palettes. 

Never even heard of that tool, looks pretty snazzy although the limitations might be kind of annoying- namely, fixed palettes that won't always be exactly what you need, but custom palettes are limited, according to
Create your own 32 color palette (Saved with presets).
especially if you're working with Quake and want a 244 color palette, not the default 256 one- the normal palette minus the last 16 fullbright colors. Looks like the ol' fiddling with gradient maps in GIMP will be my way to go for now as detailed on Preach's site. 

^224 color palette due to subtracting 32 colors, rather. Math is hard! From the previews on the page, Pixatool also seems to heavily rely on plain 1x1 dithering, even with 'the dithering' option set to off, and from my experience dithering tends to look not that good at all in Quake compared to manual color variation even if it means having a few more same-colored pixels next to each other. 

http://www.mediafire.com/file/zo8rtam6qya4eqz/q1gimp_palettes.zip

...GIMP\share\gimp\2.0\palettes\

colors>map>palette map
right click > palette to gradiant to use with brush dynamics
...
colors>map>sample colorize is another one you can use to "rip" colors from an open image.

Note sometimes converting to the indexed q1 palette in gimp can merge two or more colors with the same value into one.
Irfanview does a bit job I think and can easily batch process a load of images.
Here's a bat example:
i_view64.exe c:\Users\Lee\Pictures\Minerals\*.jpg /import_pal=g:\q\quake_palette\Q1_noBrights.pal /convert=c:\Users\Lee\Pictures\Minerals\_converted\*.tga