I'm thinking of doing it in a way that looks like it was painted. How can I achieve that in Photoshop?

And no I don't have paints or the money for paints.

That would be something beyond the scope of a simple forum response. I'm sure there are some good tutorials out there (perhaps some in skullbie's link post here) on how to achieve painterly results in Photoshop. I would hunt around tutorials at deviantart.com or a similar site, or do a google search.

I might also suggest, that if you're looking to achieve natural media results, you might want to try a "natural" media program. Painter, of course, is the first that comes to mind, though I realize that if you can't buy paints, you probably can't buy new software (Last I checked Painter was $50 for students, and I'm pretty sure you're still in school, right?-- might be different now that 11 is out).

A FREE option would be Art Weaver which I tried out for a little while before I got Painter. Its very similar, not as complete, but it might get you the results you're after, as is a natural media program.

I also believe Art Rage has a free version (and the full version is $25 or so)-- I don't like this program at all, though. I actually bought the full version of this and it was just horrible. But, it is natural media, so I'm just letting you know its out there.

I would really give Art Weaver a whack and see where that takes you.

Well I have Corel Art Essentials, it came with the tablet.

I'll probably try that out. I just remembered it.

I was just hoping for like, a texture to select or something. Thanks though!

Step 1: Use Oval tool to create series of circles of varying size.

Step 2: Rasterize circles.

Step 3: Edit -> Define Brush Preset

Step 4: Mess with settings for spacing, opacity and flow jitter in Brush pallete

Step 5: Lower brush opacity to somewhere between 40-60%

Step 6: Start painting and experiment until satisfied with results.

Results should look like this or better with practice:

Alex, you knocked my socks off! Seven sentences to say what I had to type 5 paragraphs not to say....

amazing.

Oh my. That's quite impressive! Thanks!

...What's Rasterizing?

I means turning it from a scalable vector object (a mathematical shape interpreted by software) into a raster image, that is, pixel data.

When you make the circles, they're in a vector format. Rasterizing just converts them to pixels.

Matt got to it before me.

i like artrage alot. i plan on using it for a comic one of these days