Greetings

[Wargrider@Santharia]

Greetings and felicitations from sunny Manchester, England, (Yeah, right!)
I spend most of my time developing new creatures, plants, areas etc for Santharia (If you don't know it, call in and check out www.santharia.com they're just as free and friendly as you guys, and you'll find we have our own map section as well!)
Anyway, I recently "acquired" a copy of Photoshop CS3 to help me get into developing maps for the frozen northern regions of Santharia. Trouble is, I seem to have "lost" my instruction book, so I went to YouTube, found some vids from you lot and, well, here I am!
I have a particular interest in designing objects to place on the maps. You know the stuff, temples, stone circles, citadels etc. Our maps have a 3D-ish perspective on them, so, obviously, the objects have to have it too.
Can anyone either tell me how to do this in Photoshop, point me in the direction of a program which is tailor-made for this, or just generally give me any advice to get me 'up and running'?

Nice site, BTW, very informative. And inspirational. And I feel very inadequate all of a sudden

Oh, I nearly forgot. my initial idea for designing my buildings is to draw them on paper (I have reasonable artistic ability), scan them, trace them onto a layer in Photoshop then add shading etc. Viable or no?

Whoops! I just saw the discusions on the various drawing programs etc. Ignore everything I just said. Move along now, there's nothing to see here. *Ahem*