Milk and Honey Day 13: The Difference Between a Source and a Painting
Not every painting begins with a detailed plan. Sometimes it starts with fragments. Colors, textures, atmosphere, scattered images collected into more of a mood board than a true reference. This post explores the difference between a source and a painting, and why the final piece often becomes something far more layered, alive, and unexpected than the original idea.
Milk and Honey Day 11: Why Bees?
Every spring, our azalea bushes would hum with hundreds of bees while everyone else kept their distance. Day 11 explores why I’ve always been fascinated by them, and how bees became one of the central symbols inside Milk and Honey through themes of beauty, motherhood, provision, resilience, and the quiet work of sustaining life.
Milk and Honey Day 10: The Ugly Middle
Every painting has an ugly stage. This one hit hard when a foreground I loved digitally completely collapsed on the canvas, forcing me to wipe sections back and rethink the entire direction of the piece. Day 10 explores the tension between intuition and technical skill, the moments when paintings stop cooperating, and why learning to trust the process matters long before the final layers glow.
Milk and Honey Day 9: Chase the Light. Trust the Process.
This post takes you into the beginning stages of a new collection in progress. The first layers are always uncertain, built through materials, intuition, and response to what’s showing up on the canvas. It’s the part of the process most people don’t usually see.
Milk and Honey Day 8: Carrying a Vision While Life Is Loud
My life does not look like a promised land right now. It feels a lot more like year seven wandering around in the desert. And I have a feeling some of you know exactly what I mean.
Milk and Honey Day 7: The Story of Ruth
Before we get anywhere near gold, light, and finished work, we have to talk about what it actually means to gather the raw pieces of a life. Inspired by a wide, glowing wheat field and the ancient story of Ruth, this post explores the quiet decision to keep showing up when everything hasn't resolved yet. It turns out that the margins of our lives are not abandoned ground—they are exactly where the next thing is already being prepared.
Milk and Honey Day 6: My Studio and How I Set Up
My studio is a three season sunroom in Michigan, which means half the year it’s flooded with beautiful natural light and the other half I’m questioning my life choices while standing next to a space heater.
It’s small, imperfect, and honestly kind of ideal for the way I work.
My process starts with layers of chaos. Spray paint, collage, texture, acrylics, anything that kills the blank white canvas and gives me something to respond to. From there, landscapes slowly emerge through layers of acrylic and oil paint, building atmosphere, depth, and light along the way.
Milk and Honey Day 5: The Symbolism of Wheat
The vision of a wheat field speaks to provision in Scripture: daily bread, manna in the wilderness, enough for each day without excess. It carries the tension between survival and promise, where God leads from daily dependence into inheritance and abundance. In this collection, wheat becomes a symbol of provision, restoration, and legacy, what is given, what is held, and what is passed forward.
Milk and Honey Day 4: Unpacking the Meaning in the Vision
Most visions are not fully understood the moment you receive them. At least not for me.
This wheat field collection has taken years to develop. Looking back now, I can finally see how Bible studies, prayer seasons, journal entries, dreams, visual experiments, and even technical art skills I was learning years ago were all slowly converging into the same language without me realizing it at the time.
That’s part of why I document everything.
Sometimes understanding comes later, after enough threads have had time to connect.
Milk and Honey Day 3: Testing the Vision and Why 40 Days
There is a tension that comes with holding a vision that your current life does not yet reflect. When everything around you still looks like wilderness, you learn to slow down, test what you are carrying, and pay attention to what holds up under truth. This is not about forcing belief, but about discerning what is real enough to walk with. Some promises are not proven in moments of clarity, but in the steady obedience of transition.
Milk and Honey Day 2: The Vision Where It Began
The vision didn't come in a calm season. It came in the middle of starting over with nothing, three kids, and more questions than answers. A wheat field, a promise, and a story that's taken years to be ready to tell.
Milk and Honey Day 1: Pulling Back the Curtain for 40 Days
For the next 40 days, I’m pulling back the curtain on my entire creative process and building a new art collection in real time. Instead of waiting until the work is finished, I’m sharing everything as it unfolds, from the first ideas and sketches to the struggles, breakthroughs, and finished paintings. This is a real time look at how a body of work is actually created, and an invitation to walk through the process with me from start to finish.
