I have never been quite able to understand how to paint the wire frams of a model exported to a paint program.

When I make a UV snapshot of my model's wireframe and bring it up in a external paint program, I am confused as to how I am supposed to paint it. Do I paint over or under the wire frame? When I paint over it and import the textor into maya over my model, all I get is this. There are no tutorials on this specific part of the texturing process that I can find.

I am a total newbe at texturing of this kind by the way.