Painter doesn't automatically give you drawing skills, nor does Photoshop, ArtRage or any other application. Your best friend is really a pencil until you get better, and understand values. Painter does real-life tool simulation pretty decently, so if you're interested, and of course, if you have a tablet, you can find more information about it on:
"Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." - Stephen Wolfram
And what quality you want. I got some random brand 12" tablet from CompUSA for $120, but it sucks. The cursor sometimes skips off by a random offset, then at some point returns to where it should be, in addition to just not being very precise. From what I hear, the same tablet from a name brand would be over 1k.
"Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." - Stephen Wolfram