Despite the struggling economy, interest in decorative concrete remains high. More than 12,000 people visited the Artistry in Decorative Concrete demonstrations at World of Concrete this year, a 60% increase over 2009. Contractors, engineers, architects, and others are fascinated by concrete and what creative minds can do with it. Decorative concrete contractors from across the U.S. demonstrated the new directions that decorative concrete is taking.

Rachel K. Bruce

Floormap Stencil Designs, Springdale, Ark.

After spending many years working as a marketing director for a decorative concrete company, Rachel Bruce branched off and start her own business in 2009, designing and selling custom stencils to contractors. Her primary motivation for becoming one of the presenters was to show how easy it is to use stencils to create multicolored designs.

Bruce designed a three-dimensional multicolored graphic with a more corporate than residential feel. Before applying the stencils, she diamond-polished her slab to an 800-grit finish and precut four layers of stencils consisting of several panels. Including registration marks allowed her to accurately position and apply each stencil layer. She sprayed solvent-based dyes to apply colors and gradients.

Mike Meredith

Arizona Falls, Las Vegas

For the past 20 years, Mike Meredith has focused on artificial rock and waterfall work. Rockwork still accounts for 90% of his business, but he is installing more outdoor kitchens, countertops, and barbecues.

For his demo, Meredith wanted to be more creative with concrete than his company contracts normally allow. His outdoor kitchen and built-in barbecue included a precast countertop and counter walls with handcarved rockwork. He built the structure for the counter area by laying up concrete masonry blocks, followed by a scratch coat application of mortar to provide 3-D shape in the rockwork. He then hand-carved masonry unit rocks using an overlay cement mix. His precast countertop featured a chain and skull design formliner edge, which he designed and molded himself. He colored the finished work with water-based and acid stains and used an acrylic lacquer as a sealer.

Chris Swanson

Colour, Rescue, Calif.

Chris Swanson, along with his father and best friend, are partners in their company, which focuses on intricately designed and detailed diamond-polished floors. They engrave patterns using angle grinders with diamond blades or design adhesive stencils that are strong enough to handle bead-blasted profiles into the concrete through open parts in the stencil. Swanson works out his own designs for each project. They also formulated an ingredient they can add to solvent dyes to push a color seamlessly from one color to another at the opposite end of a design element.

After diamond polishing his slab to 400-grit (starting at 60-grit), he adhered his 34-part stencil to the slab, weeding out the parts that would be bead-blasted. He made three passes with a light-duty bead blaster, alternating directions each time. Then he began dye staining using a small compressed air sprayer, pulling parts of the stencil and adding additional masking for each color, a tedious process that took most of his time. He completed the project by burnishing with a diamond impregnated strip pad and applying lithium silicate.