I replaced the pic of the first post of this thread with an improved version:

- the colors of some symbols were smudged in the GIMP, as recommended by jfrazierjr. I did not get results as clean as seen in the examples he showed in his post, but it does break the monotony of repeating symbols and looks a little bit less "copy / paste".

- the border received a couple of effects in CC3. It was looking a little bit "too perfect" for a supposedly hand-drawn map.

Looks like map creation in CC3 + final fine tuning in GIMP will become my standard operating procedure.