@swiss - if you click on darcycardinal's name it will take you to his profile page. Once there, if you scroll down a bit you will see his albums listed on the left hand side. I think there are several examples there

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In answer to Ravells's original question at the start of this thread, I started with Campaign Cartographer 3+ and used my previous non-mapping graphics skills in Blender, and Corel to make new symbols for myself to use. I've used Fractal Terrains 3 to generate coastlines, and dabbled briefly in Truspace (that app is really complicated). I also used Vue Pioneer (the free version) to make tree symbols, but abandoned that project when I learned that there were copyright restrictions on what I could do with the images I rendered from the scenes I set up (I would never be able to sell any of my maps if I had wanted to if I had carried on using the Vue trees I had made). All my home made trees these days are either drawn in GIMP or rendered from Blender.

I currently use GIMP and CC3+ in tandem to create most of my maps, but all the software I have ever used remains in my personal toolkit to be used whenever I need them. For example if I need to render a giant soap bubble to symbolise a spherical force field of some kind, I can use Blender to render it, and import it into either GIMP or CC3+ to incorporate it into my map.

Graphics apps are many and varied, but all of them... no matter how fancy or expensive... are only ever the tools in your toolbox. You are the craftsman, and the greatest skill is not about having the whole collection or being an expert in all things, but rather in being an expert in knowing which of the tools that you actually have will give you something closest to the effect you are after, and how to use them together