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First, we'll select a good base color.





Next, let's hue shift a bit toward red and chose a dark outline color.
I'm going for a very generic look, with the two optional "strips" of wood running vertically. I believe this was popularized by Doku.

You can put the crack that separates the blocks either at the top or the bottom. The logic I use to decide it whether I want the texture to blend better with the ground, or with the block above it. I usually put it on the top because the shadow on the bottom of the bottom plank will be dark anyway. So now we have something like this:



Now we'll choose an even darker color (hue shifting down even more if you want) and set our pencil tool to anywhere between 30% and 50% opacity, depending on how dark of a color you chose. I'm using 50%. Now we want to work the color into the places where the cracks intersect, as shown, with the color darkest in the few pixels nearest the intersection. You may want to add a separate pixel to the larger spaces in between dark pixels to break it up a bit. These should always be only a one or two pixels away from the main line of dark pixels however, so that it sort of looks like a broken shadow.





Sample the base color and choose shadow color for it. This color shouldn't be as dark as the other two, because instead of representing cracks, it's showing shadow.



Let's go ahead and shadow the bottom of the planks in generally the same pattern that we used for the cracks in between them, with the shading darker nearer to the sides and light and a bit broken toward the middle.

Now that we're finished shading the bottoms of the planks, we'll shade one side of the vertical strip. Which side depends on the direction of the light source, but I always go for an upper-left light source in my textures, and I've noticed that most others do also. If this is what we want to do, we'll darken the strip of pixels on the right. Now, break up the solid color. It's best to not have one of the darker pixels, say, directly between two other dark pixels, as it can look like depth instead of random noise. Also, remember not to have any corresponding lighter or darker pixels, as keeping this in mind while texturing is a good way to prevent tiling errors.



Now it's time to add grain to the wood. Draw lines from the sides at varying lengths. Then add a dark pixel one pixel-length away from some, mostly the shorter ones, so that they are close to the length of the longer ones. Now, as we have done before, add some dark pixels in the grain lines, mostly focused on the outside.



Sorry for the picture- I had a bit of a paste error.

Once that's finished, it's time to do something that I call "pushing one under." This means having a shadow across the top so that it looks like the planks above it is casting a shadow on it, making the "sunk under" plank look farther back and giving the texture a sense of depth. In some cases, we should darken the entire texture, but right now we'll choose the middle one and draw a dark line of pixels where the highlight would normally go. I decided to darken my brush for this, but you may not need to. Most times, any plank can be "sunk under", but when choosing one, it is best to pick smaller planks, as they tend to look better. This entire step is really optional— I believe that a good texture, be it planks or stone-based, will not need this.



One more shadow to do for now. We'll darken the outside edges of the planks.
After we're finished, let's check our tiling. Looks pretty good to me. With planks, I don't use tiling checks so much to look for errors, as to see how well all of the shadows and everything work, how "balanced" the texture is. I try to imagine it in the wall of a structure.



At this point, we could just leave the texture how it is, with no highlights, and it might look okay if you were going for a certain style, but we, like most, will add highlights. that is, after all, the fun part.

Okay, so let's pick a lighter color, with a bit of hue shift up to yellow if you want. The planks that I'm working with are fairly yellow, so I don't want to overdo the hue shift and make them look golden. Now we take our brush, adjust the opacity if necessary, (but not too drastically) and draw the highlights intermittently in-between the darker grain lines. The highlights should be a bit smoother than the shadows, so all of the pixels should be together, and none separate. The highlight on the very top edge of each plank should be the lightest. We should also lighten the vertical strip on the right side.



We'll quickly check our tiling, and it looks good to me. I do, however, notice that I want to make the grain lines a little darker, so I do that. We update out tiling chart, and I'm happy with that.





The last step is, if you're bothered by the planks not continuing under the vertical strip, and looking like they've been cut off, to make it look like the extend beneath them. We'll do that by taking the "base" color and setting our opacity down a bit. Around 20% is probably good. We draw a little bit so that the line between the plank and the vertical strip isn't as dark. If you don't prefer it this way, then that's fine.