The final piece for our dirigible is a four foot long banner for the balloon to tow. It will have our name on it — this is advertising after all.

For maximum effect, its ‘wave’ will move both vertically and horizontally. We created the basic vectors and lettering in Illustrator and then imported these to EnRoute.

The next step is to size everything (as one unit). Then we added a border around the letters using the outline tool.

we created a flat relief and then imported a bitmap called ‘Splotches’ from our Texture Magic: Classic Collection. We selected the banner and the bitmap to light up the button shaped like a mountain and sky. A value of 0.15 created a subtle texture over the entire surface.

Then we selected the banner and the lettering outline to raise this area slightly from the background. If we had wanted this area to not have texture we could have built a separate relief and merged them later.

Last up was the slightly domed lettering which was raised 0.15 off the outline to make it easy to paint later.

We sent the finished file to the CNC router and then it was time to do a little bending.

We have a heating blanket for just such an occasion. We put it under the banner and let the heat soak in good. A full bucket of paint and block of HDU provided the weight we needed to bending the banner.

When we were satisfied with the curve, we turned off the heater and let everything cool down. The result was a banner that looks like it is flapping in the wind.

As usual, we mocked it up behind the balloon to make sure everything looked right before moving on to paint.

Once the last of the painting was complete we hung the finished dirigible in its permanent home in our studio.

And just like that, our first fourth axis routing project was officially done!