At this point I have applied 1 coat of HDU Primer and sanded that after it had a chance to dry.
Then I applied a base coat of paint, This color is mostly for the wood grained texture background, but I'ts just as easy to apply this base coat to the entire piece as it adds another layer of paint to the sign, Plus I don't need to worry about cutting in any edges yet.
 As you can see this process was making the cow pretty hungry so I thought I'd give him some oats.

Now we're cooking with Gas!
Really starting to take on some life, It's amazing what color can do.
The basics are here but It still needs a few more coats, the lettering, the snout (pink), the black spots and the green border.
The wood grain, the white and the black lettering outline are complete.

Because of the thickness of this sign (3") and the material I have to cut it out of I had to extract 2 slices from the design using enroute. Below is a screen shot of the front view of the sign in Enroute.

In this shot the red rectangle represents the size of the plate,( material that I'm going to cut this out of), as you can see the face of the cow stands above the plate.
I made 2 slices with the first one being 2" thick and the remaining piece can cut out of a piece of 1" material.

once slices are complete and toolpathed it's off to the Multicam (router).
Look Ma No Face!
This was a big file with all the textures etc. It took the router 7 hours to cut this piece. ( this is when you hope the power dosen't go out !)

When all parts are cut I'm using my vac clamp, which is a giant bag that you suck all the air out of and the atmospheric pressure applys a tremendous amount of force which clamps everything in place. This is a great system for clamping odd shaped parts that you could not get conventional clamps on, and it creates equal pressure all over the parts.
This similar type of system (without the bag) is what is used to hold the parts on the router table when it's cuttting.
The other advantage to this type of clamping is thatthe Gorilla Glue expands as it cures and can really make a mess, The bag that holds the parts in place contains the expansion of the glue and makes for easier clean up of the glue line.

A good freind of mine Makes these awesome life sized Cows, and sends them all over the world.
He asked me if I would do a small sign for his workshop
Even though he is more than capable of doing his own, his only restriction is the software that he uses for his router doesn't have the ability to do true 3D carving like I can with Enroute.
He has always been amazed at what I've been able to accomplish using Enroute software so He wanted to see what I could do with his sign.
I started by Importing the above artwork from his web site into Enroute, then traced over the cow using the drawing tools in Enroute.

I then separated the areas of the drawing that I wanted to treat differently,(by making various types of reliefs etc.) 
I added some text and a background to the text, and a woodgrain texture (from Dan Sawatzky's Texture Magic Collection Of Bit Maps).
 to the main body of the sign which is a dished in surface. I also added the raised boarder around the perimeter of the sign. ( the extreme yellow band on the outside is not going to be part of the finished piece, the cows horns will be sticking out in mid air. this boarder is only there so I had a surface to build the horns on). The total thickness of this sign is about 3-1/4 inches its hard to see that in these shots.

Once I had everything build as I wanted in Enroute I took a screen shot of the finished relief and imported it as a jpeg into Inkscape (which is a free drawing program, similar to photoshop) and applied some colors to the piece to give it the finished look.
Now If I Can Get My Computer Back from the doctor I'll start the process of making this sign.