They didn't know exactly what it was they wanted until they met 25-year-old artist Devon Holzwarth and saw her work as a muralist.

Once they saw her ability to transform a blank wall into a work of art, they quickly asked her to paint four walls in the bedroom for their new baby.

"We wanted something to challenge our newborn's imagination," Cheryl says. "The baby is already reacting to the bright colors at the bottom of the mural.

The Wayses and Holzwarth collaborated on ideas for the mural, which included wayward ideas such as a mermaid, while including memories from the family's past, like Rob's father's old Porsche 914 and a B24 bomber that he flew in World War II.

"She asked us a lot of questions and ended up using a lot of the styles and colors we like," Cheryl says. "We love dogs, so she also painted a huge black Labrador."

What began as four plain white walls is now a colorful ode to family recollections, and Cheryl says that her family is very grateful for the five days Holzwarth spent creating the mural.

"She put so much of herself into this mural," she says. "This is just beyond anything we could have imagined."

Holzwarth says she aspired to create a room that would fit either a boy or girl. She wanted the mural to be "sweet and wonderful."

"After I learned their favorite colors, I went to Barnes & Noble and looked through children's books to get ideas," Holzwarth says.

The Wayses might never have found their muralist if Holzwarth had not recently changed careers.

Holzwarth left a steady job at Discovery Girls magazine to begin her own fine-art business. This might have been too great a risk for most artists to consider, especially in a downtrodden economy, but Holzwarth's decision came as little surprise to her friends.

"She's one of the most driven people I've ever known," says Jaime Wells, Holzwarth's former roommate at Rhode Island School of Design. "She doesn't let anything stop her."

Holzwarth's first mural project was her pastor's idea, a way to bring new life to a Sunday school classroom at WestGate Church. Holzwarth hit upon the theme Noah's Ark, sketched out her concept in the room and unleashed a parade of otherworldly animals across the walls, among them a polka-dotted penguin, a checkerboard-pattern elephant and a lime-green butterfly. Thirty feet long and almost 15 feet tall, the mural, in about a week's time, had transformed a bland classroom into a Never-Neverland.

Holzwarth's mural-painting firm just celebrated its one-year anniversary. To its credit: A half-dozen metamorphoses have been created like the one at the Wayses', with clients in such places as Willow Glen and Texas.

It's a profession that Holzwarth says has been a dream come true—a way to make fine art and support herself doing it.

"I think when you're an artist, you're always thinking, 'How can I keep making art? How am I going to do this for a living?' " she says. "You feel like you should be doing what you're doing, and contributing...I think you know in the back of your mind that you can't do anything else."

For more information about Holzwarth's murals, call 408.283.8165 or visit her website at http://www.muralstudio.com.