Richard, as with most pieces of art, all you have to do is have a concept in your head, and then an eye for composition.

I sliced up the X and then with all the pieces selected, I extruded them (all at once). This gave me a lot of wonderfully weird poses for the pieces, but didn't care for the overall effect. After all, "push button art" is for mobile phones, not real computers. ;)

So I moved, pushed, and rotated pieces, put some to back and kept in mind where a hypothetical ground plane would be as well as the height of a hypothetical camera, until the composition looked good. Then the floor shadow was used, and tweaked a little. If it couldn't get the shadow spot-on, I'd have used the Pen tool to create a shadow and then feather it a little.

My Best,

Gary