Laser Etched Monuments

• Tombstones with inscriptions etched with lasers are built to remember lost loved ones. Mel Curtis/Photodisc/Getty Images

  Laser-etched monuments are a personalized way to show mourning for a deceased person. In the age of technology, they become more popular due to the reduced cost and reduced amount of time necessary to produce them. Laser-based monument art is only a decade old, but the impact it has had on the memorial market is far-reaching.

History

• Hand-made engravings used to be the way to decorate the granite plates on the memorials. To get the personalized touch on a memorial, an artist was commissioned to do the carving on the monument. The work consisted in doing hundreds of shallow cuts to produce the image of the deceased person. It was very costly and could take a long time, so the monument industry looked for ways to automate the process. Sherm Cochran and his wife Diane founded their company called Cochran's Inc and started a new era of etching granite. Nowadays, the Cochrans offer lasers for the monument industry as well as produce monuments and sell them wholesale.

The Process

• Engravings on memorials add a personal touch to the loved person's grave. memorial day image by cherie from Fotolia.com

  The process consists of three steps. During the first stage of the etching, the polished part of the granite is removed to expose the unpolished lighter-colored granite. Then, a desired image is designed by the artist, which takes the biggest amount of time as the artist has to consult the customer on the type of lettering, photos and images chosen for the monument. When the design is ready, the composition is etched on the monument by means of a laser.

Types of Engravings

• The image that is etched on the tombstone can take various forms. Some images consist just of lettering. It can be a line from a poem, or an extract from a famous speech, or just a sentence that somebody uttered about the deceased. The image can be a portrait of a deceased person or a historic figure like Abraham Lincoln, for example. The image very often takes a form of a scene or a landscape. The scenes very often depend on a location of a tombstone. It is interesting that the tombstones in California have marine motifs engraved on them, and scenes on tombstones located close to forests have hunting scenes on them. Typically, the image consists of both a scene and lettering.