I started off gathering a few references. It wasn't easy to pull this off since the base model was a bit weird (looks too thick for a road sign) but I decided I was going for the "welcome to random town in the desert" style. At first I thought of parodying the "extraterrestrial highway" signs (nevada desert) but then I decided to go for "welcome to sky valley" which is also the name of an album by desert rock band Kyuss.
I fired up illustrator, made the illustration quickly and then ported it to Photoshop. Now it was pretty hard to define what type of material it was, because of the nature of the model. Was it painted? Printed? Anyways, since I hadn't that much time I decided to simulate a print poster, which was obviously a not very good choice. I didn't have time to make a normal map.
