Welcome Otter!

Are you waiting to get CD3 due to lack of money or just not ready yet? If you want to get started right away with your town making, I would highly suggest getting GIMP (free open source software) and taking a look at Pyrandon' tutorial. Even though the tutorial was done in Photoshop and there are some differences between the two programs, with our help, you should be able to use GIMP to make a make in a very similar style(if thats what your after).

I am not trying to push you away from CC/CD, but some people find that having more tools helps them be flexible depending on their exact needs(and others just don't like to have to choose), so if you are the type to like more choices, give GIMP a go. I know several people who use multiple programs for mapping and it sometimes just depends on what they feel like at the partcular moment as to which they will use for doing a map. Also, while CC3 can make some great maps (see this link for a few examples with the recently released CD3) some people like to pull the image from CC/CD into GIMP or Photoshop and go that extra mile to spruce it up with some stuff CC/CD can't do(which is becoming much less as new versions are released).