Growing up in California and Massachusetts, Toni Miraldi always loved to draw - although her parents did not see her making a career of it. Then one day, a high school teacher discovered Ms Miraldi sketching in a make-up art class and advised the aspiring history major to not deny her passions.

"I really enjoyed art, but my parents were going to help pay for my education," she recalled one recent afternoon during a chat in her Sandy Hook home. "And they were pretty clear that they wanted me to do something that wasn't art."

Today, nearly two decades later, Ms Miraldi has taken her drawing skills to the wall - literally - forming a home-based business called Mural Envy.

She is currently accepting commissions from both private and commercial clients to help liven up their walls with everything from towering bamboo shoots and to quirky birds to giant floral blooms, subtle geometric accents, and whimsical sea creatures.

"We moved from California to Duxsbury for my senior year of high school, and when my art teacher saw my drawings she set me up to paint a mural on the wall at my new high school. That was actually my first mural," she recalled.

After graduating from Wheaton College in Chicago and attempting to find a job as a museum curator, she realized that to make a career using her history degree, she needed to continue her education. A new husband and family put that idea on hold long enough for Ms Miraldi to refocus on her true talents.

"I started thinking about going on to get a master's and a doctorate in history so maybe I could teach," she said. "But since there was nobody around to tell me otherwise at that point, I decided to go back to art."

She enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and continued to paint, draw, and to create colorful prints, mostly for herself and for friends as she and her husband Scott raised their family. For several years she also worked in the interior design field.

"As I assisted designers across the Mid-Atlantic, I noticed that most creative expression centered around fabrics, furniture, and accessories," she states on her company website muralenvy.com. "The walls of a room were given much less attention."

Ms Miraldi and her family came to Newtown almost a decade ago and fell in love with the community. And shortly after arriving here, friends began noticing her self-produced artwork dotting the walls of her home, and started asking her if she would do similar creations for them.

"When we moved here we had all these big blank walls, so I just started creating paintings and murals," she said. "I started out with my daughter's room, then on to the guest room, then the kitchen, then the master bedroom. Then visitors started asking 'can you do one for me?' I even got invited to paint a friend's flat in London."

Ms Miraldi distinguishes her work from other mural artists primarily because she uses off-the-shelf interior house paints versus acrylics or other types of paints.

"Latex wall paint is the primary base for all my work," she said. "I may turn to artist acrylics only if I need to do some fine details. But since my work involves large, broad, and contemporary fields of color Latex works really well for me."

She draws a lot of inspiration from nature, reproducing sea creatures, birds, and plants. One of her most challenging works is in her own bedroom.

"The abstract in my room didn't begin with a clear plan. I just had an idea of working several color blocks together, but I wanted it to feel like the seashore, with bits of alternating light and dark," she explained. "I just sort of freehanded it, but it came out really well."

Ms Miraldi also loves doing designs for children's rooms, and one of her commercial-grade works decorates the interior at Newtown's Merryhill Child Care Center.

Instead of pricing her work by the finished piece, the local entrepreneur decided to price out her commissions by the square foot ($15 per square foot, typically).

A small accent section of an interior wall can be commissioned starting at around $500, while most of her larger and more detailed wall-size originals are priced starting at around $1,500.

"It all starts with a visit to my website and a call. Typically I like to do a site visit and to talk with the people who will be exposed to the wall they're thinking of having me paint," she said. "Since we're starting from scratch, I like to get the client's input."

Reach Ms Miraldi at 203-364-5536, or visit her website.