I was hesitant to use paint, too, but once I tried it, I love it. I use the MM paints. I've used paint with foam stamps or to add color and dimension to my background paper. I've also painted around the outside of a picture. It appears that the "downtown" in Cindy's first page is painted with foam stamps, too.
I posted one in here a while back, but I'll post again because I am too lazy and short on time to go look

Here are a couple examples of where I've used paints
Just the J is painted (foam stamp)
I used green paint for the title (Soccer) and the J in the journalling block (foam stamps and direct to paper, or in this case, picture, since I used a pic of grass to stamp the title on!)
Here is a Disney page. We rented a pontoon boat at POR. The yellow around the bottom right pic is painted on. I used a foam brush to brush yellow paint around the frame of the pic because I ran out of yellow cardstock, so I painted the white

I love the way the brush marks look on the edges of the photo. You can't see it too clearly in the pic though.
Have fun!