Paint rollers are very popular for painting articles of all sorts, and a variety of special paint rollers have been proposed for unusual situations. U.S. Pat. No. 2,799,884 (Bedford, July, 1957) proposes a roller assembly having two roller-receiving leg portions joined at angles to each other for painting outside corners. U.S. Pat. No. 2,813,392 (McLendon, November, 1957) describes and shows a collection of three rollers arranged to embrace a portion of a cylindrical surface. U.S. Pat. No. 2,904,813 (Schleicher, September, 1959) shows a variety of arrangements of very narrow discs on supporting rods for rolling paint onto the entire peripheral surfaces of rod-like objects. Another three-roller system is proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,035,022 (Iuliano et al., July, 1991).
The paint roller arrangements of the above-mentioned patents are relatively complicated in construction, and the positions of the rollers relative to each other are such that while they may be effective to apply paint to the intended objects, applying the paint to the rollers from the usual paint tray by rolling each roller or groups of rollers in the tray is not possible. Moreover, the paint roller systems of those patents are intended primarily for painting surfaces that face the user or face laterally of the user.