The Gimp
Photoshop
One of those is what you’re looking for. If you have the money and don’t mind spending it get Photoshop. If you don’t want to spend any cash get The Gimp. Either way, you can make textures and paint in both of them, they are very similar programs. Photoshop is pretty much the go to program for both texturing and painting. You’ll also find a TON of tutorials scattered around the web for photoshop.
Still, no matter what, even for creating textures you need to understand light, shadow, color theory, etc even if on basic level. If you want to create scenes, also, you need to understand these and perspective and composition. If you want to be good, you can’t get around it unless you are extremely talented.
You say you want to create intense scenes yet you don’t care about colors. Well, you can work in grayscale, but in color, you need to learn how colors work, and how to make them intense.
(BTW, if you have a tablet, it is possible to work in painter, ps, gimp all the way, I rarely ever use paper anymore when I have access to my computer. And last time I checked gimp, the win version had serious problems with tablets, and also it didn’t have the brush engine that makes ps more than an image manipulation tool.)
You see I believe that some scenes are good in 3d and some are good for 2d and it is good to have both on my belt. So I made this forum to see what styles are their. I also wish this forum was much bigger so that I can ask better questions. If only the blenderartists forum had more on 2d programs or even had a separate 2d program to go along side blender. What do you think?
all i can say, is learn GIMP first… then if there is some tool or utility you need that gimp dose not have, look at comercial packages…
I have switched from paintshop pro to photoshop then to GIMP.
gimp has everything I need, and more!
the thing I like most about GIMP the the dynamic hotkeys…
goto your prefrences, and put a checkmark in interface>dynamic hotkeys.
then shut down and restart GIMP…
now anytime you hover your mouse over a menu item, you can just press your desired hotkey to assign it!!
one thing I know for sure… GET ZBRUSH NOW!!! 
it does 2d,3d, and 2.5d!!!
Zbrush and gimp are verry powerful to have alongside blender
Texturmaker dosent suck either, but that is even further off topic 
EDIT::
Oh yea!! get inkscape too, it is excelent for small raster graphics like icons and cursors… soon we can use SVG for webpages …
to a certain degree you can import your SVG from inkscape into blender, which is nice for logos and stuff.
if you do animations, try Ktoon as well, it exports SWF flash format!
I’ll get it only if I know I can uninstall it because I installed project dogwaffle but couldn’t unistall it. I just want to know if I can do that.
Huh? Start menu, control panel, add/remove programs, project dogwaffle, remove, just like with every other software that doesn’t put an uninstaller in start menu.
We’ll to tell you the truth project dogwaffle didn’t have one so I had to reformat the computer to get it out. I tryed it before but it didn’t work.
Company2 for painting stuff from scratch (IMO) your better off using dogwaffle than GIMP. Don’t get me wrong I love GIMP (it’s my image editor of choice), but it’s brush engine is behind the times (I have heard there’s a new system in the works).
Maybe you should invest in the dogwaffle video tutorals?
Hmm, who are the “them … really good ones” who are drawing on paper first?
Take a visit over to Cgtalk’s 2d / showcase forum, the majority of the art there is done “digital-direct”. Visit the Bauhaus Mirage forum and the majority of the animators there are also working “paperless”. Two small examples admittedly, though together they represent a fair amount of artists.
…What does Z OMGWTF BBQ mean? (I can guess on OMG, WTF … but what is ‘Z’ and ‘BBQ’ ? 
Mike
You see I had the older version of Dogwaffle and it was crappy and I wasn’t sure if I wanted the real thing so I erased it and downloaded Inkscape and hopefully it was easier. Also I need to find a good texture making program. Textures are really hard to make so what are the best I mean should I use GIMP.