On My Final Project Again....

I've decided to word paint an image of New York City at the moment of the terrorist attacks on 9-11-2001. The big issue right now is whether I should create each item (Statue of Liberty, Twin Towers, Airplane, City Skyline) inside Microsoft Word and moving them together into Photoshop or should I Photoshop all items to get the best outline at the cost of words getting cut off. I don't quite know. Another issue is about how big I want this to be, and the more I think about it, I think I would like the picture to be larger than the regular 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper so that I can fit everthing I want at a readable size (probably at least 12 point font) without being crowded (I would really like a lot of white space for some unknown reason). Furthermore I can't decide if I actually want just white space or if I should textualize everything, including the sky and the water that would've been left alone. And one more item to consider, I don't really know what font I want to use and that'll probably make a lot of difference. Thus, I need to get just about everything planned and thought out before I begin... I doubt I'll have time to go back and fix things whenver I want to.