Book Carving

Prompt: Explain how you developed your design for your book carving.
I developed my idea for the book carving after decieding which of the five themes I wanted to use. The choices were simplicity, along for the ride, scientific, questionable, or fears and phobias.  I decieded that I wanted to do fears and phobias because I had the idea of looking up a list of fears/phobias and choosing one that would look interesting carved. I found two that interested me including hylophobia (fear of forests) and anthrophobia (fear of flowers).  After making a few thumbnails I decided I liked the idea of carving trees rather than flowers.  I came up with an idea for the cover and drew my final sketch to see how big to make everything and how to lay out and layer the pages. After I finished planning I began to carve starting with layer one.
How important was it to have a clear plan before starting?
It was really important to have a clear plan because I wouldn't have known which layer to do next or the layout of anything without it. It helped me understand how to carve the book and didn't make the layers confusing.
What were the challenges you faced when working on this project?
Some of the challenges I had with this project was cutting each layer similarly so that pages didn't stick out the further I cut into the layer.  It was also hard being patient and taking my time. Plus cutting the trees on the last layer was hard because they were really small and I had to cut tiny triangles out of them. 
Explain how you overcame them.
I ended up having to go back and re-cut some layers because the pages stook out too much. This took time but it made the book look a lot cleaner.  I took my time because I knew I would mess up and it would look bad if I didn't.  With the tiny trianges I just cut them slowly to make sure I didn't rip the page.
Discuss your design and how it relates to the book you chose (if that was the case, if not just discuss design).
My design doesn't relate to the book I chose. My design was about trees because my theme was hylophobia (fear of forests). I drew a tree on the cover of the book and filled it in with black pen. I added leaves cut out of pages from the book to the back of the book and had them stick out.  On the inside cover I cut out a picture of a tree and wrote 'hylophobia fear of forests' to explain the theme of my book. The actual carving was of trees, rocks, a path, a cabin, and a sky as the background. 
Did you take any risks? How and why?
I took risks with the trees because they were curvy and cutting curves was difficult.  I also used tissue paper which I have used before but I didn't know how it would look in the book. The biggest risk I took was putting the tree on the cover because if I messed up it would be hard to cover up.
Describe how you felt about the overall project and if you felt it was successful.
I felt really good about the overall project and also felt it was successful. It turned out the way I had visualized it. I love the cover, the addition of the leaves, and the color the tissue paper gave for the background.