That’s a bus to you and me, but not to Rick Ricketts of Virginia Beach. To him it represents a $500,000-a-year business. The owner of SignMasters, Inc., Ricketts has shifted into high gear, painting buses, tractor trailers, vans, minivans, SUVs, cars — anything that moves — for clients as far away as Chicago and Philadelphia. "We do planes, trains and automobiles," the 54-year-old Ricketts says.

Ricketts and his five employees’ "statements" — sort of where Norman Rockwell meets Earl Scheib — can be seen regularly on buses in Hampton Roads and Richmond. This spring they’ll literally wrap up a project for Old Town Alexandria. Their innovative digital printing process produces decals that are wrapped on the vehicles at a cost of between $6,000 and $9,000, depending on the complexity of the design.

Part of the bumper-to-bumper art includes a revolutionary digital technology that allows even the windows to be covered, though from the inside of the vehicle, the view is still clear. "I really can’t tell you how we do that," Ricketts says. "It’s a trade secret. I feel like the CIA. We’ve gone from a couple of cans of paint and some brushes when we started to an office that looks like Star Fleet Command today."

Ricketts opened SignMasters in 1976, after retiring from the Navy, where he had been a graphic artist. "We’ve got printers that can print five-feet wide and 40 feet long," he says. "It’s like a puzzle, putting the decals on the bus around framework and grills. It takes us a couple of days to do a bus. We earn our money."

SignMasters produces about 16 or 17 mobile billboards a year, according to Ricketts. In the last 15 years, he estimates they’ve done over 350 such projects. Notably, a project this summer covering a Hampton Roads Transit bus promoted the Blue Angels’ appearance at the Neptune Festival Air Show in September. "We heard a lot about that one," says Ricketts. "Everyone noticed it."

He expects similar word-of-mouth hype from a current project, turning a bus into a battleship to promote the U.S.S Wisconsin exhibit at Nauticus in Norfolk. Among Ricketts’ personal favorites are a "Phantom of the Opera" bus to promote the New York stage production’s appearance in the Tidewater area and two customized ’60s Volkswagen bugs painted a la original Jerry Garcia watercolors for Discover Card’s new Jerry Garcia card. "It’s a win-win situation," he says. "We love the creative process and the work, and our customers get a mobile advertisement with some real impact. And if you’re just on the street, you get to look at something besides a plain, old bus."