Just curious but are you doing the shadows using black? It's really muddying up texture quality and different material will react differently with shadows. You can't just overlay or multiply black and expect it to work, take it from someone who used to do that. =P Someone mentioned it before but I really recommend watching…
heyo! here are some good tutorials for the handpainted feel paid: http://3dmotive.com/series/hand-painted-texturing.html https://gumroad.com/turpedo free: http://blog.bitgem3d.com/post/33293411529/3d-hand-painting-workflow-02 http://www.pinterest.com/pin/404690716489171325/ http://www.pinterest.com/pin/404690716489491647/…
If it helps reinforce Tyson Murphy's tutorial, he's one of the artists on the WoW team at Blizzard Entertainment. They've basically co-led the charge for hand-painted looking games.