MATTAPOISETT — To cheer up neighbors during the coronavirus pandemic, six-year-old Eli Rickson used his imagination to go above and beyond the normal lawn sign or window drawing.

He asked his parents, Sarah Storer and Dave Rickson, if they could paint the front of their house with a rainbow gradient.

“We loved the idea, so why not?” said Storer. “It’s just paint.”

Storer and Dave, who have lived in Mattapoisett since 2009, needed a fresh coast of paint on their house, so the idea from their son made sense.

Ten cans of paint, and two weeks later, they had a house that Sarah said people can’t pass without smiling.

Dave normally works as a scenic painter for films and has worked on movies such as Ghostbusters (2016) and Knives Out (2019). He has been out of work since mid-March because productions are put on hold.

At first, Dave thought that a mural would be a good idea, but the project soon expanded into painting the front of the house. 

Before it started, the family made sure their neighbors across the street were okay with it because, “they’d be waking up to it every morning,” Dave said.

So he counted the boards on the house to know where to paint and fade the different hues, got the necessary colors, and worked slowly but surely for two weeks on it. Eli helped paint the purple and blue boards at the bottom of the house. 

When it was finished, Eli was able to show off his house to his classmates at Center School in what his teacher called a Zoom “field trip.” He took his computer outside and turned it around to show his friends and teachers the new vibrant colors of his home.