Try to ensure that you avoid giving rise to clusters of leaves that will repeat in a very obvious way when this preliminary canvas is tiled later on.
The human eye is good at recognising patterns, but we are going for a natural, unregimented look here. So use a series of quasi-random, non-parallel strokes to create an even scattering of the leaves.

You should aim for something roughly like this:

The first pass with the Movie Brush

Here are the underlying paths of my brushstrokes in the image above.

Keep building up the leaves on this "back" layer until the background is almost, but not completely covered.
You will notice that the shaded area built into the leaf shapes begins to pay off now by implying a little depth.

That should be enough leaves for now. There are still two more layers to fill.

Now switch to the next layer up ("middle"), and adjust the scale of the brushes.

Click the "middle" layer to make it active.

Slide the brush size slider to around 45

Now fill the "middle" layer with the slightly larger leaves. Don't worry about obscuring the "back" layer, because you will be making these two layers slightly transparent later.

Keep avoiding repeats and patterns.

Now move up to the "front" layer, and increase the size of your brush once more.

Two down, one to go...

Take the brush up to 52

Here's the "front" layer The two lower layers are switched off, for clarity

Now Composite the Layers

We've given the leaves a different size in each layer, now it's time to adjust their colour cast and brightness so as to give more depth to the texture. You will apply a subtly different degree of colour correction and brightness/contrast to each layer.

Start by making the "back" layer active, then click the Layer button on the Actions Palette, and choose >Color Correction...

The "back" layer should be a little more blue and duller. Try the settings below.
Note that Color Correction is not editable. If you want to tweak it later, you must delete it first using the Objects Palette, and then re-apply it.

This will make the layer darker and add a blue-ish tinge.

The Color Correction tool in Satori can give rise to some very dramatic changes in your image, so apply it gently.
Make your layers gain in warmth, brightness and contrast towards the "front". Be subtle.

The Color Correction objects in the Objects Palette.

Adjust the Transparency of the Layers

Once the colours of the layers are to your satisfaction, it's time to adjust the transparency of each layer.
This is easily done with the slider at the top of the Layer List Palette.

Play with the Opacity slider until "back" and "middle" look just right. Keep "front" at 100%, though.

When you are happy with the look of this preliminary canvas, save it either as a .RIR bitmap file or as a .CVS file

I used the .RIR bitmap file type.

Now you are ready to start tiling the image to make a larger bitmap. To see how it's done, go to page four.

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