What is a lithophane? Click here to read about it. Click on the pictures to see a larger view. Please see our examples and order form below:
What are lithophanes? A lithophane is a carving of a photo on a material that allows light to pass through. When viewed under normal lighting the carving seems flat and lifeless. When light shines through the lithophane from the back the carving comes to life and the detail from the original photograph is seen. When backlit the carving glows and is mesmerizing.
How does a lithophane work? We use a material called corian that is manufactured by DuPont. This material is most commonly used for making kitchen countertops. But it is also the perfect material for making lithophanes. It has semi-translucent properties and carves very smoothly. We take your photo and input it into our CNC machine software. The computer then runs the CNC machine, which uses a router for the actual cutting, to carve the photo. The lighter areas of the photo get carved deeper into the material and the darker areas are carved more shallow. When light is shined from the back of the lithophane the shallow areas are lighter and the thicker areas are darker.
A lithophane makes an amazing gift for any special occasion and will last a lifetime. Even the LED lights in the frame will last at least 20,000 hours of use. If you have wanted to think of a truly unique, personal and meaningful gift that someone will treasure for the rest of their life, this is the gift. We can take almost any photograph and transform it into a gift that is one of a kind. It is likely that the tears will flow when the person you are giving this to turns on the switch and their treasured photo comes to life.
We make two sizes of lithophanes; 5x7 and 8x10. Depending on the orientation of the photo you give us we can make it either portrait or landscape. The frames are designed to sit on a table and have a power cord that gets plugged into the wall. You can order the lithophane with a custom built LED backlit frame or you can order it without the frame and hang it on a window with suction cups that we supply. The frame has four screws on the back and is made so you can easily take the back off and put in different lithophanes if you want. And the frame is made so that you can display it in either portrait or landscape mode depending on the orientation of your lithophane.