Soooo... I don't think I've done this before, and if I have, it would have been like once. But I'm going to return the two credits you spent on this submission to your account. Normally I do that because a student has made major mistakes in going through the material, skipped instructions, etc. but that is very much not the case here.

I just can't really find anything to critique worth calling out. There's just one thing, which I will mention, but it's minor at best. So, I'm going to be marking this challenge as complete, but I will not be accepting payment for it. You've simply done a fantastic job, and have left me without much to say. I'm thrilled to see how much attention you've paid to ensuring every mark is a cast shadow, how much attention you've paid to the presence of each textural form and how they relate to their surrounding surfaces, and the sheer volume of control you've employed across the board. Fantastic stuff.

So the point I did want to call out has to do with the very first texture - the leaf. Here you run into an issue where you outlined the "main" vein too much and too early. Rather, it's not an outline, it's the shadow, but that shadow becomes an outline where it blocks off smaller veins that should be coming off the larger. This is simply because you jumped ahead on that too soon.

The better way to approach it is to avoid handling the "straightaways", and focus instead on the "intersections" (if we think of this like streets in very organically planned city). You can see an example of this here in Lesson 3's leaf exercise diagram. Even though I know two sections will ultimately connect, I don't worry about how they get from A to B. Rather, I only establish cast shadows where one vein branches off into several, putting those shadows in the spaces between them as they separate. Once all that's done I could go back in and add some additional cast shadows for straight aways if I feel they're necessary, but at that point all the veins are plotted out, and there's no further risk of accidentally cutting something off that hasn't yet been drawn.

Actually, there's one other even more minor thing I wanted to call out. On the same page, your third texture - the "more rocks". Here in your gradient you essentially combined two separate textures together. For the purposes of the gradient, it's best to stick to an arrangement of just one kind of textural form, so that the gradient itself is achieved by modifying the shadows that are cast and how the light plays across the forms, rather than jumping to a different kind of texture to achieve a sparser or denser effect. This allows us to focus on the strengths and uses of implicit markmaking, rather than focusing on doing what we can to achieve the result of a gradient.

Anyway, that's all - you've done a fantastic job, so keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.