[teamhillbilly]

When I do my shallow relief on deer or elk I have problems with layers and contours of the body rounding antlers etc.
Mine look 2 demensional

[mark yundt]

without any photos for reference I am imagining that the antlers loose the depth you are looking for ,,as well as the body.Are you saying they don't appear to sink into the scene?Reliefs for this reason are more difficult to do than they might appear.For this reason profiles are mainly used, but in the case of a deer,, the antlers from any angle pose difficult problems.One of the keys is to really follow the perspective of the piece to try and fool your eye.What I mean by this is, for example,, you have a left side profile,the antlers on the right side of the deer should be noticeably smaller in thickness and size,,making the ones on his left appear larger, thicker,,and closer to you (things close are large,,those further away smaller).If he is looking straight at you ,, well then you have the problem of his snout pointing at you,,in this case It will probably end up looking the best only from a straight on view because of a phenomenom called foreshortening.Generally for most reliefs,,even shallow,control of the levels and layers is very critical even if it's only incremental changes of levels.You are almost trying to carve a 3D image in nothing slightly more than 2D,,you have to compress everything into a much narrower slice of the whole piece.I've used this example before,,but look at a coin,,the images look great and read well and they only happen in fractions of an inch!Microscopic changes in every level...WOW!

[teamhillbilly]

here are some turkeys I did