Decorative artist Shirley Offill always has been in touch with the business side of her art, even as a child in her hometown of Missoula, Mont., where she recalls selling pictures on the school playground for a dime.


Now, Offill applies her talents to the walls and ceilings of businesses and homes in the Spokane-Coeur dAlene area, creating scenic vistas, patterned faux finishes, and eclectic designs.


For Offill, anything in a home can be used as a canvas. A tiled kitchen backsplash becomes a scene of weaving vines covered with lush grapes, a plain corner is transformed into an overhead view of a blooming English garden, or a sitting-room wall takes on the patina of aged copper.


She owns a five-year-old specialty contracting company here called Specialty Walls that she operates from her home in Mead and that has done commercial decorating projects for clients such as Spokane cabinet maker Hunter Creek Inc., Spokane Valleys Bruttles Candies LLC, and Coeur dAlenes Mountain Comfort Furniture & Design. Each job, small or large, is uniquely designed for the client, Offill says.


Everything I do is custom, she says.


Specialty Walls had revenues of about $30,000 last year for about a dozen jobs, and Offill hopes to double that this year as she adds more commercial clients. Right now, Offill does all of the work herself, or works as a subcontractor to other painters, as she did on the Mountain Comfort job, but says she might hire an assistant or apprentice as her business grows.


Offill says her work gets to be kind of pricey, with labor costs of $400 to $500 a day, but the Montana-bred artist really gets her back into it. She says she spends a lot of time standing or lying on scaffolding as high as 30 feet. Bigger jobs can take a week or more of such work, she says.


For homeowners, she says, she often paints murals or does specialty treatments such as trompe loeil scenes, which are realistic paintings of either lifelike or fanciful scenes, often bordered by painted-on, three-dimensional-looking window frames. Such pieces are designed to trick the eye, creating an illusion of space or grandeur, Offill says.


She says shes always experimenting with new techniques, using her own home as a testing facility for different wall treatments. For example, she currently is decorating one wall in her studio with a mix of animal print paper, maps, and textured paint. There isnt a plain white wall anywhere in sight in her home.


Colors my thing, she says.


Though Offill says she has an affinity for color, she also has formal training in art and design. She attended the University of Montana, studying fine arts and design, before moving to Spokane and earning an associates degree in graphic design from Spokane Falls Community College. Shes a member of the Inland Northwest Decorative Artists and the international Stencil Artisans League Inc.


For seven years, Offill applied her skills at a sign business she started here, called Banners by Shirley. Though she says she closed that business to turn her focus to family matters for a time, she continued to work as an artist, developing decorative painting techniques and faux wall finishes such as a leather look created by applying crumpled artists tissue paper to a wall and painting over it, she says.


She says she found herself doing a lot of decorative painting for friends and others who heard about her work through word-of-mouth. Eventually, with her husbands encouragement, she opened Specialty Walls.


Aside from Offills small studio, her business, ironically, has no walls. Instead, she travels to clients homes with her portfolio for consultations.


I dont have a storefront because I have to see the home, she says. She often guides people through the myriad of possible faux finishes when they want to do something different, but arent sure what. She brings with her before and after pictures of her projects to help potential clients visualize the effects.


In the first couple of minutes I can tell what colors they like and what their decorating style is, Offill says. She says her clients often express surprise at how a colored wall accentuates the artwork they already own, or creates a different mood in their home. One of her most popular finishes right now is a marbled finish painted in three warm orange-brown shades, which she calls caramel marble. It creates an illusion of a textured wall without using textured paint, she says.


Its my bread and butter, she says.


Offill says people sometimes are wary of making changes to their walls, but often are surprised by how much they like the results she achieves.


Its like its all in my hand, she says.


Some of the main tools Offill uses are a trowel and a big, wooden-handled stippling brush, which she uses to apply all kinds of texture materials and glazes that she mixes at each job site. The exceptions are the trompe loeil scenes, which Offill paints at her studio on a type of canvas. She then installs the canvas on the clients wall with plaster. That way, the artwork can be removed later, if needed, and placed in a new location, she says. Other faux treatments are removed from walls much like stripping wallpaper, she says.


Offill says that she sometimes shows clients on tighter budgets how to prepare a surface for the decorative techniques she will use, saving them some of the cost for labor-intensive projects. For example, a common texture used on the Sheetrock in many homes that feels like the bumpy skin of an orange must be sanded off before certain faux finishes can be added.


Offill says more people are becoming interested in faux finishes and color in their homes, and she credits decorating programs on television channels such as Scripps Networks LLCs Home & Garden Television for helping people see the possibilities of faux finishes. She says people often see something on a television program and want to re-create the look in their homes.


Contact Jeanne Gustafson at (509) 344-1264 or via e-mail at [email protected].