PORTLAND – A white, fiberglass, full-sized cow arrived in Maine last week, but it will leave the state looking like a work of art.

Decoupage artist Scott Potter will unveil the unadorned bovine early next week in Potter’s studio on High Street. Until then, it remains in a local storage facility.

Potter is one of 100 artists invited to decorate a cow statue as part of a fund-raising event called Kows for Kids to benefit troubled children in Portland, Ore. The entire herd will be put on public display in Oregon on April 1 and remain there until being auctioned off in July.

“We’ve seen it done so successfully in other places, we thought we’d try it here,” said Kristy Wood, director of development for New Avenues for Youths. The agency for homeless children will share proceeds of the auction with Trillium Family Services, a social service agency for at-risk, abused and mentally ill children. “It’s a tourist thing as well.”

The cow-decorating trend started in Switzerland, shuttled to Chicago and stampeded across the country. It has proven to be a moneymaker.

The Chicago project – which featured 340 cow statues placed along city streets in the summer of 1999 – raked in an estimated $200 million in additional tourism. The auction, expected to raise $250,000 for local charities, instead took in $3.5 million.

Naturally, other cities attempted the same. Decorative cows have paraded through Manhattan, Houston and Kansas City before being auctioned.

Cincinnati branched out by commissioning pigs. New Orleans (fish), Toronto (moose), Lexington, Ky. (horses), Rochester, Mich. (sheep), Norfolk, Va. (mermaids) and Orlando (lizards) all got into the act. Rockland, Maine, had a collection of painted fiberglass lobsters scattered about the coastal city. St. Paul, Minn., celebrated hometown comic-strip artist Charles Schultz by commissioning 51 5-foot-tall dancing Snoopy statues.

In the Oregon project, sponsors pay $7,500 for the cow statues. Artists receive a $1,000 honorarium.

“Which doesn’t even begin to compensate them for their time,” Wood said. “It’s really for their supplies.”

Potter, whose customers include the royal families of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Dubai, said he hopes to show his completed Decowpage at the Portland Museum of Art before it gets shipped to Oregon.

A fiberglass cow presents different challenges than the exquisite glass vases, trays and plates with which he normally works.

“It’s very unusual because you’re dealing with the contours of an animal,” he said. Potter, 39, got involved with New Avenues for Youth through a high-end jewelry store in Oregon that sells his work and has been a contributor for several years, he said.

As for cows, “I’ve milked ’em,” he said. “I had some friends who had a farm, so I know how to twist an udder.”