Was surfing and downloaded a little program called ArtRAGE and it was so much fun I bought it, only $20.00.
It is available for both PC and MAC. It is lacking in some elements, such as reordering layers but has many of the abilities of such programs as Painter without such a big price tag.
This was started from a photograph. The program is available here, should anyone want to download it.
It has support for Wacom and other tablets. And some excellent examples of what can be done both on the site as well as an associated forum of as you might imagine, avid users.
This just took a couple of hours and half of that was learning how to use the program, so it is really quite fast. Also is capable of doing metallic like sprays, so it is a full program for less than the cost of most plugins and is also can output to .psd with layers intact.
http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html
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