Some time ago, friend asked me to make lamp with bear... it took me a lot of time to came with something, just engraved bear motive in plexiglass with led strip underneath worked best, but as prototypes goes, it had some mistakes. First of all, dont use plexiglass, most times you get rolled plexi, it have hidden stresses inside, everything can look awesome, but when you start polishing some scratches with flame, small little cracks will appear and it glow by itself bcs of the stress inside. Just invest more and buy polycarbonate, you can polish it with flame and every motive you engrave will glow like hologram in space. Im using my cnc for engraving and routing, but you can draw motive on it, use tool like dremel and engrave it by hand, it dont have to be deep, just to break light from led strip and i make wooden frame around polycarbonate bcs glow from the edges can be pretty poweful.
Fox ( red led strip)
Custom logo ( rgb led strip)
you can see glow from edges, imagine that at night
take a look at my other projets @dantak maybe you will like them too ;)