- fake watercolour, that is . it's samj:s watercolour filter in g'mic and some texturing - i've made several experiments with that and this one turned out too lovely (in my own opinion) not to share.
p.s. i need better paper textures. if anyone has a paper texture with a rough surface, like this one, or a really thick linen paper texture or an antique paper texture to share, please tell me!

This is a Photoshop tutorial you can adapt to make your own in Gimp.
Old Paper Background Texture

odinbc: thank you! that tutorial will be useful. however, it's not what i'm after right now - i'm looking for a texture with heavy grain in it, a rough surface with lots of visible fibre. handmade paper, thick linen or cotton paper, that kind of stuff.

Did you see the new G"MIC weave filter, maybe it can be useful making visible fiber if you ran it on multiple layers with different weave and layer mode?
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=6217

This is a link to MrMamurk's My paint bacKgrounds and another one that I think Ramon Miranda TheShock created it.

A couple of papers you might find interesting in this pack

feniksas4-Real-Seamless-Paper-Patterns

Also although more a cloth than a paper, I tried this

1 filled layer with fibre pattern (Gimp default Pattern, I think)
2 Ran filter artistic>apply canvas and set height to 6
3 new layer filled with colour linen "faf0e6" and layer mode changed to colour

This gave me these results



Here is the pat file

Just remembered this tutorial I came across once, not tried it and the end result is blue but sure it could be changed.

http://www.aaronhartland.com/how-to-create-a-linen-texture-with-gimp/

he4rty and esper: - you've both been a great help and i'm so grateful it's ridiculous!! this is just the kind of stuff i was after, i can't thank you enough.
jamac4k: thank you for helping, but i can't see the first page (get an error message from firefox, don't remember the wording but it made me feel like i was trying to do something very illegal ) and the second link seems to lead nowhere - or is it a direct download? in that case i'll have to change my settings to allow it.

Don't worry AnMal:
I've just upload both archives to my dropbox in one folder

jamac4k: that's nice, grainy and rough paper, i appreciate your help!