Night Light SVG: 9 Free Laser Cut Lantern Bundles
A candle holder is a vessel for a flame: the pattern sits on its wall and the light leaves in bands. A night light works the other way round. It is a picture with a light behind it — an animal, a scene inside a tent, a child’s name on a cloud. The glow is not the decoration here, it is the background everything else stands on.
Which is why these get cut all year. A door sign is wanted for a holiday; a lamp in a nursery is wanted in February exactly as much as in October, and it is given away more often than it is kept.
Below are nine free bundles: lamps for a child’s room, scene night lights, lantern houses and hanging lanterns. Every one of them is an archive rather than a single drawing — four state ten designs each — so what lands in the downloads folder is a good deal more than the twenty-two pieces shown on this page.
Lamps for a child’s room
Animals Lit From Behind
The build is the same in all of them: a figure stands in front of a round shield, the LED strip hides behind the shield, and the light traces the figure’s outline. The figure itself stays solid — what glows is the air around it.
The bunny and the bear are the only design of the three with two characters, and they have to hug tightly: the light only gets through in the gaps between the figures and the shield.
The bunny on the moon is put together differently. The moon itself became the source — it is pierced with a field of small holes and the light leaves through them as speckles. Clouds and stars are separate overlays laid on top of the shield.
The bear cub has a ring of round openings running round the edge of the shield, and they read as a string of bulbs around the figure. The base here is oval rather than rectangular, so the piece sits lower and wider than the other two.
Ten designs in the bundle. Formats: SVG, EPS, PNG, PDF and DXF, ten files of each, drawn for 3 mm plywood. The maker gives one warning worth repeating: LightBurn sometimes gets the dimensions wrong when it imports an SVG, so open the DXF there instead.
Ocean Scenes in Acrylic
The one bundle here where the glow is not the air around the figure but the line itself. A clear acrylic panel sits in a wooden base with LEDs inside; the light enters through the bottom edge and fires wherever the acrylic is cut or engraved. Bubbles, waves and the outline of the panel light up, and the empty field stays clear.
The panel shape changes with the design: a scallop shell with radiating ribs for the mermaid, a circle for the turtle and the whale. The shell is noticeably wider, and on a shelf it takes more room than the photo suggests.
The characters themselves are cut from wood and laid over the panel, which is what keeps the scene from falling apart: glowing lines behind, a solid figure in front. Separate seaweed and coral stand along the front of the base, also in wood.
Materials per the listing: 3 mm wood and 3 mm acrylic, clear or frosted. Formats: SVG, EPS, DXF, PDF and DWG. The maker names the machines it was made for: Glowforge, xTool, OmTech and other CO2 and diode lasers.
The practical part: on acrylic, brightness depends on how dense the engraving is rather than how thick the webbing is. The denser the lines, the more light they pull out of the edge, and the dimmer the area next to them comes out.
Personalised Cloud Signs
The only piece in this collection that hangs on a wall instead of standing on a table. The cloud is built in two layers, the lower one slightly larger than the upper; the strip hides between them and the light escapes into the wall around the whole outline. What is left on the wall is a soft halo, and the sign itself looks like it is floating.
The scenes differ, the device is the same: an animal sits or sleeps on a moon, stars and small clouds around it, and the name goes on the right. A deer in a polka-dot dress stands on a cloud, an elephant in a nightcap sleeps on a crescent, a lamb lies on a cratered moon.
The name is assembled from separate letters glued on top, so the design works for any name and not only the one in the photo. That is the reason these get given as presents: the thing arrives addressed to somebody.
Ten designs in the bundle. Formats: SVG, EPS, PNG, PDF and DXF, ten files of each. The lines are marked out in the file: red is cut, black is engrave.
Animals Holding a Lantern
The lamp here is a real lantern, not a backlit panel: a slotted wooden box with a tea light or an LED inside, and a sitting animal beside it with one paw on the frame. A puppy in a nightcap, a lamb waving, a teddy bear — all on the same rectangular base, so a shelf of them lines up.
Ten designs in the bundle, all drawn for 3 mm material. That thickness matters more than usual: the animal, the lantern and the base all meet in slots, and a sheet half a millimetre out leaves the figure leaning.
Files come as SVG, DXF, EPS, PDF, JPEG and PNG.
Scene night lights
Here a candle or an LED sits inside a body and the surroundings are built around it: a deck, a campfire, a tree, a bicycle. The piece still works switched off — as a model.
A-Frame House with a Deck
A triangular house with long slopes running down to the ground and two floors inside. The lower one is glazed across the whole wall, the upper one has a balcony with railings. In front there is a deck, a short flight of steps, a table, two chairs and planters at the corners.
This is the only piece on the page where the light barely leaves as a pattern at all: it comes through the windows, the way it would in a real house, and the walls stay solid.
The longest build here by some distance — railings made of individual posts, furniture, stairs. In exchange it does not read as a plywood craft project; it is a model of a house that happens to light up.
Lantern Houses in Wood and Acrylic
A closed box in the shape of a house: plywood walls with the windows and doors cut out, and a translucent acrylic panel behind them. The light sits inside, so the whole front glows evenly instead of throwing a pattern — the acrylic spreads it out.
The drawing is engraved on the acrylic rather than cut through the wood, and that is what makes these read as pictures rather than as boxes. Wheat stalks bend across the gable of the first, a willow branch with a small bird hangs over the second, and the A-frame has branches and butterflies filling the whole triangle. The engraved lines stay dark against the lit panel, so it comes out as a drawing in a lit window.
The joinery is left on show: finger joints at the corners, roof planks slotted in from above, a stepped plinth under each house. The A-frame is the odd one out — its roof runs to the ground and the gable becomes the entire facade, which is why the drawing on it is the largest of the three.
Ten designs in the bundle, for 3 mm plywood. Formats: SVG, EPS, PNG, PDF and DXF, ten files of each, with the lines marked out — red is cut, black is engrave. Same maker as the animal lamps above, and the same LightBurn warning applies.
Tents in the Woods
A triangular tent on a flat base, the entrance cut as a curve like a folded-back flap. The body is the same in all three; what changes is the cutwork in the slope and the figures around it.
The first has stars of different sizes and a crescent in the slope, and the light goes up through them as points. A bicycle and a BIKE CAMP sign stand on the base beside the entrance, tufts of grass slot into the deck, a fir tree stands at the edge.
The second has the slope cut with small leaves instead of stars, and the light lands differently — short strokes rather than points. The scene is a summer one: a broad tree on one side, a campfire on the other, a bench in front of the entrance with a kettle on it.
The third is back to stars, with a guitar leaning against the tent, a campfire at the entrance, a fir tree to the side and a pennant on the slope. The guitar is the reason people take this one: it sets a story going instead of just filling space. It is a present for somebody who camps and plays by the fire.
Christmas Arch Lanterns
An arched lantern box, the same shape in all three: a pointed arch cut as a window in the front panel, side walls joined to it with finger joints, and the scene standing inside in layers, one sheet behind another. A light at the back turns every layer into a silhouette, so the picture gets real depth instead of reading as one flat cut.
The first holds a nativity: the manger in the middle, a figure kneeling on each side and a star at the top with its rays cut clean through, so the light spreads down from above. The second is a winter cabin among fir trees, with a sleigh and reindeer crossing the moon. The third is Santa holding out a present to a child, with a tree and wrapped gifts between them and a window behind.
The nativity is the one to cut for a mantel that already has plenty of Santa. The cabin and the Santa scene carry the season without being religious, so either can stay out from the first snow through January. Put an LED tea light or a battery string inside rather than a candle: the walls are wood and the light sits close to them.
Hanging lanterns
Fairy House Garden Lanterns
A closed lantern built from flat panels tabbed together into a faceted body, with two ears at the top for a cord. Unlike the flat panels further down this page, these are three-dimensional and hang outdoors as readily as indoors — over a table, off a branch, along a porch.
The pattern is made of holes rather than openings, and that changes what lands around it. A moon disc with a halo of small dots on the first, an eight-point star over a dense grid of pinpricks on the second; the side panels carry their own smaller cutouts. Light leaves through hundreds of tiny points at once, so the lantern does not throw a picture — it scatters specks across whatever it hangs above.
The third is the one that earns the set its name: it is built as a house, with an arched door for the candle and a smaller round-topped window above it, and dotted stars filling the wall between them. Two openings instead of one, so the light comes out at two heights.
The candle sits behind a tall opening in the front panel, which is the one part left properly open. It is the only spot where the flame itself is visible; everywhere else the wood does the filtering.
Ten designs in the bundle. Formats: SVG, EPS, PNG, PDF and DXF, ten files of each, with the lines marked out — red is cut, black is engrave. The same LightBurn note applies here: reach for the DXF.
Kerosene-Lamp Panels
These lanterns have no body at all: the panel is flat and no candle goes inside. In the photos a string of fairy lights sits behind the panel and the individual bulbs show through the cut scene. The outline copies an old kerosene lamp — body, side guards, a cap with a ring for the cord — and the scene is cut where the glass would be.
Four scenes: a cat with bats, a witch on a broom among bare trees, a turreted house behind a spiderweb, and a ghost with an umbrella next to a pumpkin. They are meant to go up together. On its own each one reads as a single picture; four in a row turn into a window garland.
The house is the busiest of them: turrets, arched windows, a fence, a web in the corner, bats and a crescent over the roof. There is a lot of fine cutwork in it, which is exactly why it is better hung than stood up. Hanging, the light passes through every opening at once; on a shelf the bottom of the scene, the fence and the ground-floor windows, falls into shadow.
The cat is the opposite case: it sits in the middle, bats scatter above it, and that is all. There is more empty lit field than cutwork, and the silhouette reads from across the room — which is more than can be said for the detailed house.
What to know before you cut
A flat panel needs light behind it. No candle goes into a lantern panel, and no tealight lights a nursery lamp: these run off fairy lights or an LED strip. That decides where the piece can live — near a socket, or with a battery compartment in the base.
Small parts vanish into the bed. The scenes here come with a lot of separate little pieces: grass, a bicycle, a kettle, the letters of a name, sprigs of coral. Parts that size drop between the ribs of a honeycomb bed while the cut is still running. A backing sheet under the material fixes it, or small holding tabs you trim off afterwards with a knife.
Inside a closed body, use an LED candle. In the house and the tents the walls stand right against the flame and a real one has nowhere to send its heat. An LED also leaves no soot on the inside of the slopes, and that soot never comes off.
Acrylic does not behave like plywood. On plywood what glows is what has been cut through; on acrylic it is the cut and engraved line itself. That is why a fine stroke works on acrylic where the same stroke would simply burn away in plywood.
LightBurn and somebody else’s SVG. The maker of the animal set says outright that LightBurn distorts dimensions on SVG import and recommends the DXF. Take it as general advice: if the archive has a DXF, start with the DXF.
If you keep coming back for files
Everything on this page is free to download with Creative Fabrica’s free trial. The arithmetic only changes once you notice you are back for a fifth or sixth file.
Creative Fabrica sells an All Access plan for that case: instead of one file at a time it opens the whole library — fonts, graphics, 3D SVG, embroidery and the classes. Billed yearly it works out at €4.99 a month, €59.88 for the year against €348 at the regular rate.
If you sell at markets, the part that matters is the licence: commercial and print-on-demand use are included, so whatever you cut from those files is yours to sell.
More light
Tealight holders — ribbed spheres, domes and small fretwork lanterns — are collected separately: Tealight Candle Holder SVG.
More seasonal glow, including a book lantern and skeleton-hand lanterns, is in Spooky Season Laser Cut SVG.
Ideas on the same theme, with examples and variations: Laser Cut Luminary & Candle Holder Ideas.
The rest of the free file catalogue is here.
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Good to know: the files in this guide are hosted on Creative Fabrica. Downloading is free with their free trial: a payment card is needed to start it, and you can cancel the subscription at any time.
