CU OK Real Cardstock Doodled Flowers and Leaves

This freebie took entirely too long and my head is throbbing.  I thought it was a good idea but the more I think about it I made it much harder than it had to be. ** smiles ** Story of my life! I doodled some flowers and leaves in Illustrator and printed them out on 8 x 8 textured cardstock.  Then I cut them out and photographed them under harsh light to give them a strong shadow.  I then brought the photos into Photoshop where I cropped, desaturated and adjusted the levels of each.  I then used the pen tool to trace around the shapes and extract them.  I then created a shadow layer under the flower layer that resembled the real shadow produced in the original photograph.  The idea was to make the flowers and leaves look as much like real cardstock as possible. But I couldn’t flatten them because when you recolor the flower, the shadow would be recolored too! So in this set are 10 flowers and leaves and 10 matching shadows to place under them.  You can leave the shadows off if you don’t want to use them and if you like you can adjust the opacity of the shadows if they are too harsh. Here’s an example of how you can layer them and I added one of my buttons to it (click on picture for BIG view).

Does it look realistic? Are the shadows too strong? I’m not convinced. But anyway they are all in .png form and greyscale, ready for you to recolor or add a pattern to! 
Also, I have one tiny tiny request.  If you have any questions regarding my TOU, how to use the freebies in Photoshop or PSE, or anything else – can you please drop me an email?  Sometimes it is hard to track you down when you comment on the blog with a question and I find it so much easier to respond to emails.  Speaking of which, I have several to answer right now so I’m gonna post this and get to them so I can head to bed!

Download the CU OK Cardstock Flowers and Leaves w/shadows HERE

or HERE