Is it all so very bad? I can't see

Today marks the milestone of my ability to create and in a very basic sense understand the concept of normal mapping. 

This is where my problem started. This was my first attempt at a corinthian column capital and I tried to make it low poly hence the AWFUL leaves and dodgey volutes. This was around 17k polys altogether which was WAY too many as I estimate that I will need 6-12 of them. I had to redesign my column to get it much more low poly. 

Using the reference pic for inspiration I redesigned and revalued the silhouette of my capital. I found that with this type of design I could do most of the detail using normal maps. The only additional mesh information I wanted was the fleuron and the corner volute. 

After I made the basic shape I unwrapped it so that I could do some texture iterations and try to make the normal maps. I made a practice handpainted texture to see what a normal map would look like. I made the compressed file black and white and inverted the colours following a tutorial. I uploaded it to crazybump as a 'height map'. I was so happy with the results I got. I added the texture to my capital as blinn > bump mapping > tangent space normals > then added my diffuse to the 'colour' bit. I couldn't see my texture until I turned on high quality rendering. 

Diffuse with ambient occlusion. 

inverted B+W

Normal map! 

 I am SO SO SO happy with the results and I am going to be cracking on perfecting the shape and texture now. I want to do some iterations of the capital design.