Hi Graham - Jesse gave you some great tips above. Here are a few other ideas on some construction techniques you might find useful.

Here I started with a drawing with one closed outer loop and a few open curves that divide it into sections:




One thing I thought you might find interesting would be to give some more of a kind of textured curvature along the top surface of the piece, rather than just having it flat. It's not really too difficult to get this.

To do that, I switched to the front view and drew this curve above the others:



Then I switched to the right-side view and drew another similar one:



To construct a surface, I selected one curve, then ran Construct / Sweep, and then selected the other curve as the rail. This generated this curved surface:



This will become the top surface of your model. You can vary the shapes of the curves to produce different curvatures and different shaped surfaces.


Now the next step is to select just the closed outer curve from the bottom and extrude it to punch it up into a solid. You want to bring it up far enough so that it punches through the curved top piece. That looks like this:



Now select the extrusion that you just did, and then run Construct / Boolean / Difference, and then select the curvy piece as the object to subtract. This will cut your extrusion into 2 pieces. Select and delete the upper piece, which leaves you with this:



Now you can select that piece, run Construct / Boolean / Difference, and then select the open curves that divided the bottom closed curve. This will slice the solid into different smaller solids:



So I guess you would cut each one of these with a different wood to get a different color and pattern.

One other thing you may find interesting is to Fillet these pieces which will round off their edges:



I hope that might give you some additional ideas! Let me know if you have questions about any of these steps.

- Michael