MetaCreations Painter has an incredible amount of power when it comes to creating backgrounds for web pages. It has so many tools to create unique personalized backgrounds or to modify existing images to create something unique. Some of the techniques take only a few steps. Others require a little more work.
There are other techniques that could be used, but they have limited utility because of their format. For example, a weave could be used as a background, but most weaves use contrasting colors. Darkening and lowering the contrast detracts from the overall form of the weave, so it didn't make much sense continuing in that direction. The technique for using a weave is a matter of capturing a pattern, checking it out, and saving it as a file.
