Maple, you fool, I am using no photoshop or gimp or filters or random brush patterns, whatever that is. Also... I improved that second one, since you seem to like it.

yeah that is really cool...
so how do you do it?

You can see how; download the blendfile attached, and open it with blender. You must use the absolute newest version which isn't even official yet, but it's better than version 2.48a because it has texture nodes, which I used. That can be found at grahicall.org. If you use blender2.48a, you'll get nothing in the node window, cuz none of them exist.
Edit:
The texture itself, before becoming baked into a 2d image, is actually movable in 3d space, like that.