I've downloaded some armor and weapons that were modders resources on TES Nexus and were making an .esp for them. I created some new items and put the proper meshes and icons with them, but when I put them on a character, they do not show up, or they show up looking really weird. I think it has something to do with the textures, but I don't know how to apply the textures to the items in the .esp. Can anyone give me a little hint on this? Great thanks in advance.

In what way are they "showing up weird"? Pink/Purple in appearance? Stretching off into the distance? Are you using any body replacers? Also, some screenshots of what's going on would be helpful.

have a look at the file paths in nifscope.

You hit the nail on the button. They are not showing up on the characters, except in pieces where they may be pink/purple in appearance. The characters wearing them lose their bodies when I put them on. One armor is also stretching off into the distance. I will download Nifscope and see if I can find out what the paths are.

Yeah, I thought that might be it. The pink/purple sections indicate a missing texture and the invisibility/stretching issue indicates a missing NormalMap. A normalMap has the same name as the related texture, but with _n added to the end. Example:

robemcblack.dds is the texture for the Black Robe.
robemcblack_n.dds is the NormalMap.

So, somehow or other, the textures either didn't get installed, or they got installed in the wrong place. Either way, NifSkope should tell you what the correct texture path is intended to be.

Like Vyper said, my guess would be that you created your own folder structure for your mod, but the meshes are looking for the textures in the original folder structure they were in. You have to open the mesh in Nifskope and set the texture path to the new one you created.

Yep, I did create my own folder structure, completely ignorant of the way textures work. Thank you all, now I can get back to working on it.