Since I do a lot of talking on my blog, I'll cut the chatter a bit and show the goods... Here is some nice old mahogany I scored at a garage sale cleanup (in addition to two sheldon style quick action vises) and a 1/4 scale mockup I built for the table I'm intending to build with it. I'm borrowing heavily from Mario Rodriguez's Providence Writing Desk.
This type of model is also a project that I teach in my model making class, which involves scaling a photograph into usable dimensions, then building a scale model from that plan.