Anyone have experience in this type of model ?
the leaf’s “stem” should countinue to the tip of the leaf, getting narrower all the way. it should also have “branches” going out towards the sides of the leaf from the “stem”
I’m screwed
Heheh 
You could use bumpmap for it, it would be a whole lot easier (and if it was me, and I didn’t need the leaf to look good in closeup, I’d use a plane with alpha texture of the leaf). Sorry to say, but so far the leaf doesn’t look very good.
What are you going to use it for?
best way to make leaves is with alpha mapped psds, pngs or tgas. Just a texture on a plane. Just get a leaf from outside, put it on your scanner, load it into photoshop or gimp,…make a new pic with transparent background,…use the magic wand tool to select the background of the leaf, invert selection, then use the move tool to drag the now selected leaf onto the empty transparent pic, plop it down, so the stem is right on the bottom edge, save as PSD, and load it into blender. Then load it onto a plane, set texture to ‘use alpha’ then in materials buttons, click on ‘alpha’, then ‘ztransp’ and turn the alpha slider all the way down, and you should have a nearly photorealistic leaf.
Well, photo would be consider cheating, that’s alright, I model the vien, the image is updated so if you haven’t seen it yet look again.
You forget the most important rule of 3d modelling: if it LOOKS good it IS good
Don’t worry, I’ll improve on the texture for now on this is a ruff one just to see how it renders.