I am aware that you can sculpt a high-poly mesh in Sculpt Mode, then make a low-poly version of that mesh and then bake normals from the high to the low. I am also aware that you can paint normal maps in Texture Paint, but the problem with painting them is that it doesn't always give you the normal results that you want and is generally more difficult than a bump map.
Is there a way to "sculpt" the normal map vectors onto a normal map texture? So when you brush heavily and smooth our certain areas of a normal map it would generate the colours accordingly?