For creating my april scene I chose to use a close up of leaves with water doplets in a new forest environment. I orihinally began designing the leaves using alpha channels which is shown in the image above. Although it appears to work, due to the plane which the leaf bitmap is on, there are no true shadows cast on the leaves when a sufficient light is added. To correct this I use splines to create the leaves by tracing their image using the line tool and placing the bitmap of a leaf onto the surface. This method worked well with the shadows and look identical to the alpha channels method.