Clean Up 3D Flowers

So I decided to attempt at cleaning up the pixel paint effect flowers in photoshop with the paintbrush tool.  This way they would look much cleaner and flow better with the matte painting, also because it aids in understanding how I will work when placing the 3D pieces into the composited photographs.

Here is what I began with.  It is untouched. (This is the exact one found in an earlier post.)

I then added a brown background onto it since the piece will not be white and also when I normally paint I use a darker background because for some reason I feel I see the colors better.  Sometimes I do either brown or a warm gray background.  

Here is what it came out as.  I blurred a little more on the flowers towards the back and attempted to keep a stronger line on the two flowers that are closer to the viewer.  The flower buds were much cleaner when they were rendered so I didn't have to work with them too much, but the stems have proven to be a tough battle.

Here is the layer of what has been painted onto the 3D piece.

I then decided to see what it would look like on a white background.  Since even though it may look good on a dark background for light colors, dark colors tend to get lost like the lights do on a white background.

As you can see it doesn't look very good on a white background.  I certainly was not happy about that.  It still looks greatly pixelated even though on the brown piece it appeared smoother. 

So I jumped back into photoshop to see if I could correct this problem.

It turned out better and less pixel-ly but I would like to see a better flow, although I don't want to loose the 3D look that the paint effects in Maya provided.  This has proven to be a good learning experience but rather frustrating to reach just the right point.  Overcoming the pixel look was very tough and a little more experimenting will have to go into it but I am confident that this can be overcome to create a interesting piece of combined elements.