Last of the summer leaves

to creat an elliptical shape for the bowl
1 - select a perfect circle and use a b/w gradiation.
2 - use the perspective tool to correct the shape to an irregular ellipse - that is it has a broad front.
3- select similarly for the water using a blue
duplicate and apply a gradient using a different blue
3- make a gradient using both your blues and either a transparent section or a white section in the gradient using one of the ripple effects.
4- apply the twirl filter
5 - duplicate the layer and apply layer effects.
6 - the edge is made by selecting the solid shape and making a border and putting a gradient fill in the revers direction to the main gradient

creation of a leaf using a couple of soft edged brushes I made - one of which is a roughly a hollow sq with rounded corners - the intention was to simulate the texture of the leaf.
the layers in the image give you some idea of the layers and masking I managed.

Warping the basic leaf after flattening the previous file and creating a new one

one leaf warped

bringing all the elements together