Ok...I understand what you mean. We sell them in the scrapbooking stores all the time. The way they are created is by manipulating shapes (rectangle) with the warp tools to the shape of a bow or another easy example is a flower by manipulating a circle with the warp tool. You can use the blending mode for your shawdowing, bevels and coloring after you are satisfied with your graphic you merge them visable...you should be recording all these steps through your actions tool.

What I do, is take a look at a picture of what I am trying to create and determine the shapes and the shadings that I can manipulate into making that graphic.

You can also use the filters that comes with the program...but sometimes you cannot run the action in other programs that do not have those filters installed. ...although there is another outside filter that makes ribbons and curls. 

Here is a link to the outside filter curl program (it does have a free version) and a tut to achieve the same results using the warp tool. You can also make a action by just recording the steps of the tutorial. Hopes this helps you to understand how these are made.

http://www.avbros.com/pagecurl/

http://pstutorialsblog.com/83/page-curl-effect-tutorial/

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