u/1tacoshort

I've been wanting to learn Art Nouveau ever since my wife and I saw some pieces while we were on vacation. Since I've found no books, videos, papers, lecturers, pamphlets, Reddit posts, or any other form of information about how Art Nouveau furniture is built, I've had to figure much of it out for myself. This piece is a design exercise I did based loosely on a couple pieces by Majorelle.  I did the design on paper and then followed that up with a Fusion 360 project.  I then 3D printed some templates based on the Fusion design.

I know Majorell did a lot of his work in mahogany but it's hard to get that from a sustainable source.  Because of that, this piece is in cherry (it's about the same hardness as mahogany and it's beautiful).  It worked out well, I think, and I'll be using cherry in my future Art Nouveau projects.

The first challenge was how to get angled legs while keeping the joinery nice and square (all this was built on traditional mortise and tenon joinery).  My solution was to cut the legs from massive square posts.  These were glued up from 8/4 boards since I couldn't find 5" square posts.  The shapes were then roughed out with a bandsaw based on 3D printed templates and then refined with a ryoba and with rasps.

The table design includes a cove that sweeps down one leg, across the stretcher, then up the other leg.  I 3D printed a template for the arris on the edges of the coves and transferred the design using a knife.  For more complicated portions of the design, I drew the scrollwork on some tracing paper and transferred it to the wood with carbon paper and a burnisher.  I carefully lined up the design with the wood edges and the arris from the 3D template.

Most of the work for this thing was done with a system of gouges and carving knives.  One of my big conundrums (conundra?) was how much of the carving to do before the glue-up and how much to do after (I'm still not sure what the right answer is).  It's easier to carve the individual pieces but I need the cove to transition smoothly from leg to stretcher to leg.  The only way to get that is to do the carving after the glue-up.  I chose something in the middle.

In the end, the whole thing was sanded down to 220 and then finished with a couple coats of Osmo Polyx