My name's Bill Ahrens.
I'm located in Port Orange, Florida.
The name of our company is Str8lines LLC.
Narrator: Bill is known as Billy the Brush on TikTok.
His page, Str8lines, has over 640,000 followers
who tune in to his visually pleasing
freehand pinstriping.
Pinstripes are a pattern of thin colored lines
that run parallel to each other on a car.
Bill paints anywhere from 150
to 200 cars per week.
Most projects involve painting two lines on a vehicle
to add color variety.
For each design, he uses a variety of brush sizes
that allow him to execute the perfect pinstripe.
Bill: For our real fine lines,
I use a double-zero brush,
and it's made by Mack Brush Company.
It's made just for us.
I could get a 16th inch of a line with that brush,
and I can probably get just shy of a quarter inch with it,
but you can go all the way up to a No. 1 brush,
where you can get a little bit wider
than a quarter-inch line with that one.
I probably have 60 different brushes.
As far as what to do,
I mean, if we're doing lettering
or if we're doing a picture
or if we're doing cartoons,
they're all different as far as what we're using.
Most cars, I'll run a magnet or a piece of tape
down the side just to give me a reference point.
But the customer on that specific car,
he wanted me to do it completely freehand.
No magnet, no tape, no anything.
The fortunate side of that is that
that car has a really, or that truck
has a really nice body line to follow.
And really, with the newer body styles on these vehicles,
there's not one line to follow.
There might be 26 different grooves and lines.
So I use that to pull down the side of a car
to pick a body line or sort of make my own,
then I just use that as a reference point to work off of.
It helps, obviously, with accuracy,
and it allows me to do a better job.
Narrator: As seen in most of his videos,
Bill paints pinstripes on the side of a vehicle.
In some cases, customers want
the same style of pinstripe around the entire vehicle,
including the hardest area to pinstripe,
which is the hood of a car.
Bill: No. 1. A lot of times,
you know, I've seen it before
where I've had to almost build a straddle
where I could straddle the hood
and sort of put a board underneath me
where I could sit above it,
but getting to it's the challenge.
What I try to do first is I'll draw the top line,
which is about an eight-inch line,
using a double-zero brush,
and then I'll switch to a No. 1 brush
and I'll draw the quarter-inch line
underneath the bottom.
And then what we'll do is let that dry for a second,
and then in the middle of that quarter-inch line,
I'll draw another eighth-inch line
or even sometimes a 16th-inch line
back on that double-zero brush.
Narrator: Part of what makes Bill so popular on TikTok
are his behind-the-scenes videos
of how he fixes his mistakes.
Bill: I don't think you ever perfect it.
It's just one of those things that, still, every day,
I mean, I've had no problem drawing a line like that
for 15 or 18 years now.
It definitely takes a lot of work.
But most pinstripers, as you know,
they do one panel at a time.
We've developed a way where we can do it
and still get full consistency out of it.
But sometimes, like that particular one,
if I'm not mistaken, I believe a piece of dirt
or something got in my brush,
and as I was turning it sort of
feathered out a little bit on me.
In that case, I'll just take it off and start over.
Narrator: Bill typically charges $100
for two straight lines on a car.
For triple-stripe work, it's more expensive.
An entire hood, painted and designed,
and longer projects that involve character painting
cost around $3,000.
Bill: I'll tell you what the neat part about it is.
You know, it's always nice
when you can make somebody smile.
I mean, I know everybody says that,
but usually it's a kid,
or when a kid sees something for his first time,
that's where most people,
but what I find the best part about it
is it could be somebody in their 70s or 80s
that's never really seen it done by hand.
They've heard about it,
or maybe they haven't seen it
in 40 or 50 years or 20 years.
So you get a little crowd around you
when you're working around cars.