Help on Carving

[Teloni]

The first example you show is rather low relief, so I would probably use ZBrush to sculpt the details onto the pendant or broach. There are a lot of tutorials out there for ZBrush that should be able to get you started.

The second example is high relief and could be done in ZBrush or more traditional modeling techniques. I would probably use box modeling to make the flower part, as if they were free standing, then just weld it to the board.

[Arrimus]

The first one is simple sculpting. Choose a sculpting program and get to it. If you have 3DS Max 2010 and up it has a Paint Deformation tool which functions like a poor man's sculpting tool.

For the second example, you can take that image and turn it into an alpha/stencil and then sculpt with it, like so:

http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/6115/sculpttest.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/28/sculpttest.jpg/)