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To start out we are going to make a log, that's right, a log. You may be thinking, "why a log, I can do that", well, because I want to. Besides, you can learn allot from a log.
Many people I know would do this: 123 done! Nope, your not done (you know who you are). Noise effects are not all powerful. While a noise effect here and there can give the feeling of texture, they aren't always the way to go.
First let's examine what a log is: a log is wood, usually a cylindrical shape of it.
That, my friends, is a cylinder. As trees have round trunks, when you cut them apart they have round ends to, so I make two circles, and connect them with two lines.
Hey that was easy, but straight on is boring and we have a few considerations to take: Top down RPG games are weird in their distortion; if we looked at this from top down, a circle should be compressed 50% of it's height, but I'm not done with it yet.
I just rotated it a bit, then erased the part of the circle that is hidden! now, I rotated it about 45æ or maybe a bit more so you have the top down compression 50% and a horizontal distortion of 50% so they seem to cancel out (If you want to rotate it more then you will have to smash the circle horizontally). But that isn't much like a log, logs come from trees so we have to consider what trees have: branches, bark, holes, fungi, roots, and maybe leaves. A plain log is just too boring.
When a tree falls not all of the bark rots away at the same time, and you certainly don't have a perfect cut so you may have some sticking out past the edge. I also added a branch and a little scar.
Coloring time! I used a brown for the main part, and a lighter one for the exposed area in the inside as that is usually lighter in trees.
I'm not going to shade from every possible direction, but here I shaded for a vague top right light source. I reduced the dark out lines and made the circles on the end. As you can see I used lines going along the grain of the wood to texture it. That is the way you generally want to do bark and wood texture for trees and such.
I added another shade and darkened one that was there, I think it looks fairly descent :)
So, what have we learned so far?
- one can break down a form into basic shape(s) to gain a further understanding of it's geometry
- bark texture can be made using rough lines along the tree or log
- noise effect can be almost as evil as the gradient tool :)
vs. 
same log with noise effect instead of actual hand drawn pixels.
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