My First lithopane - WOW!

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I am estatic at the success of my first attempt at a lithopane. I have been making some trophies using 1/4" clear Lexan and I have been less than impressed at the amount of stuff that has to be cleaned off the carving after the machine has finished. The effect is good. It's just like lithopanes except the front face is the uncut, smooth face rather than the carved face in lithopanes. This of course only works with a clear medium. Opaque material results in a dull, fuzzy, indistinct image that anyone who has looked at a lithopane from the wrong/smooth side has seen. But the trophies are Lexan. (photo attach 1 and 2) This is my first experience with "Corian" (in quotes because I think it is actually one of the other brands). It cuts very clean with negligible sticking dust to clean up (I have a Ringneck Blues DC).

The subject of the litho is a photo I took of my Bichon Frise as a puppy when he fell asleep next to a small teddy bear that he would play with (photo attach 3). Sadly he died a couple of years ago at age 10 with metastatic intestinal cancer, but I have many fond memories of him including this particular photo.

I imported the photo into Designer and just used the default settings to make the pattern - it needed no cleaning up. I used a 8 x 10 piece of 1/4" Corian sitting in (taped) a 11" x 22" MDF sled that was previously carved by the CW specifically for that purpose. I carved using a 1/16" carving bit set at .220 depth and 450 height setting. I set it a little bit deeper than what Jason says in his Tips and Tutorials #16 (he recommends .018 ) because I wanted the dog's fur to contrast highly with the bear's dark fur without making the bear just a big dark blob. This way the shiny highlights on the bear's fur show up well and give it some dimension. (it's more evident on the litho than the photo here shows) The feather and draft were set on NONE and the bit optimization was set on BEST. The actual carving was done on the BEST setting. I was extremely pleased at the result and now I have to figure out what kind of back lighting device I want to use for display - a light box, vs. window hanging, vs. lamp shade, etc..... and what photo I want to do next!

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