Once upon a time in another place I started a series of tutorials covering the use of a handy little app to extract a .png from a photoshop brush and creative ways to use those .pngs in Xara. I've been asked if I would post these tutorials here, so for anyone who may find them interesting here are the first two and AbrMate the conversion app and many wonderful hi res brushes and textures can be found at TextureMate.com

paintspatterstecil_tutorial.xar
Xaramagic_tutorial.xar

If you like these and would like me to do more let me know here in this thread and I'll continue on here from where I left off.