r/ArtNouveau

The Nelson Atkins has a wonderful show dedicated to Mucha, curated by his great grandson. Here are a few highlights!

I was originally inspired to try building something like this after stumbling upon the medieval reliquaries collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London a few years ago. They had some really cool caskets on display, which were small wooden boxes with decorative enameled panels attached to the sides, and I thought that might be an interesting vessel to stick a guitar pedal into. At the same time I was also really getting into Art Nouveau, more specifically the work of Alfons Mucha and René Lalique, and I wanted to incorporate some of those elements as well.

The enclosure and knobs are made from CNC milled black walnut, which I hand finished and oiled with a few coats of Tru-Oil. The decorative top plate and knob toppers are CNC milled 2mm copper plate with vitreous enamel designs (glass powder mixed with a bit of water, applied in layers like paint, and fired in a 1450° kiln), and the LED cover is a tiny copper ring that I fused a bit of the transparent orange enamel to. I used Affinity Photo to make the designs and save them out as SVG files, which I imported into Easel to generate the G Code for my CNC machine. My machine is a Genmitsu 3020-PRO MAX V2 which has been absolutely fantastic for this scale of work. Turns out a 125B sized enclosure is just about the thickest thing you can work on!

This was my first pedal build and I went with the Seabed Delay from PedalPCB for the circuit, which is exactly the sound I was hoping for. Vishay Dale RN60 resistors, WIMA and KEMET capacitors, Bourns pots, Switchcraft jacks and Gavitt push back wire.

Hotel Tassel in Brussels, built by renowned Belgian architect Victor Horta is considered as the first true Art Nouveau building.

Margaret Macdonald (1864-1933) was an English-born artist who worked in Scotland. Her design work became one of the defining features of the "Glasgow Style" during the 1890s. Her innovative work was inspired by Celtic imagery, literature, symbolism, and folklore. She often collaborated with her husband, artist and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and her sister, artist Frances Macdonald.