1. Before starting the creation of our book carvings, we made an outline for our design. My design is supposed to be the bottom half of a person's face with a tear running down it. This plan was really important to have so that you'd have a template to carve off of. Otherwise, it would be impossible for you to carve everything close to the page above it.
2. There were a ton of challenges when carving this book. First, you had to be really careful as to not impale yourself with the Xacto Knife, which I did end up poking myself with a few times. Secondly, if you cut through one page, you cut the page underneath it too, so if you weren't careful, you'd make cuts where cuts should not be. Thirdly, when cutting close to the spine, the cuts got really difficult because the book curved down to the spine where it was bound, leaving choppy cuts that I didn't like and was not able to fix fully.
3.I overcame these obstacles by going over the edges of the cut again once I had carved the layer out. This did help for some of the layers to make them look nice. My book design may or may not have any significance with anything in my book. I wouldn't know I didn't read the book. I wanted to portray a sad, yet, happy sort of picture. Even though it seems dreary in the background, the person is smiling (may be hard to tell) leaving it up to the viewer to decide if the tear is of happiness or sorrow.
4. I did take risks by having layers that were 40 pages thick. This proved to be VERY annoying and it made it difficult to make a beautiful cut, and when finishing the layer, some pages were a bit off, though I remedied it by cutting it again. I also made a lot of long cuts in the beginning which led to very bad cuts, so I started making my cuts shorter.
5. I did not like this project at all. Maybe it was because I picked too many pages to go into a layer or maybe it's because I poked myself with the knife or maybe it's something else entirely. I did not like the cutting of the book and was very happy when I cut the last layer of the piece. However, even though I did not enjoy the creation of this artwork, I did like how it came out. The shirt looks silky and the color I was able to blend for the skin came out nicely. The cuts look better than they did originally and overall, it looks nice.