That's the thing about raised carving. It takes a ton longer than incised or relief carving, but by being raised, that also allows you to knock back the elbows and flat spots that inevitably show up in everybody's work. The thing about tendrils is to avoid long stretches of parallel lines and thicknesses. That makes carving boring, and gives it a "by the numbers" look. When it comes to curves, try to either slowly tighten them or slowly loosen them as you are progressing from one end to the other, and for sure avoid the flat spots. Do your outside convex portions of your curves first before you start sculpting away the inside concave parts.
When you're doing incise carving your margin for error is substantially less than with raised. I would start out with your pencil line, but BARELY make a scratch in it with your veining tool. When you go back over it you can THEN adjust your cut to either the inside or the outside, depending on where the elbow or flat spot is. Some guys are so good they can just do it all in one pass using mallet-driven tools. I'm not one of them. I need to sneak up on my finished shapes using the small pushed tools, like the Pfeil # 11 and # 12, and even those I consider to be pretty coarse.
