The Final “The End”: Where Daughters of the King All Began

Believe it or not, Daughters of the King  all started with a 17-year-old boy from Georgia.

In the Spring of 2010, a young boy named Alex Stoddard had begun a 365 project, and would spend the next year creating and sharing a body of work that, when I stumbled upon it in the summer of 2011, so captivated me that I began to question what my purpose in life was.

 

 

It sounds so…. Cheesy, but I can not think of another way to describe what I was experiencing at the time. I will admit that it was rather disconcerting, and has been ever since, to see that the path I had envisioned myself so clearly on, the path of an International Relations graduate from Brigham Young University, began to split in two directions. Suddenly the direction in which I had been traveling began to lose its appeal compared to what my eyes were seeing as I methodically worked my way through Alex’s year long project.

 

 

I searched for other photographers like Alex, my eyes drinking in their photographs like long swallows of water on a long parched mouth. The simple portraits I had been photographing as a casual hobby could no longer satisfy my need to create. It was at that point, using photography as my medium and photoshop and costume creation as my canvas, that the need to become an artist was awakened inside of me. Suddenly every ounce of joy I had experienced in creating as a younger girl seemed to all be compounded into one solitary moment every single time a new idea for an image came to my mind. I wanted to create, to tell the stories that had been building in my mind since I was a little girl.

 

 

Several months later, I sat at the foot of my mom’s bed one morning as she got ready for the day.  At the time, my mom was serving in our local church as a leader in the Young Women’s organization, a program designed to help girls aged 12-18 learn about their potential as women and as daughters of God. Throughout the program, the girls work on developing eight different values to help them prepare for being a woman, mother, and disciple of Jesus Christ. As I sat there on my mom’s bed, feet curled up underneath me as I watched my mom try on various outfits, she mentioned that she had been thinking about my photography and thought that I should do “one of my artsy pictures” for each of these values she was teaching her girls about.

 

 

And so Daughters of the King was born.

Of course,  I would be lying if I said I loved every minute of this project. There were many, many times when I felt so frustrated that I put off making any effort to work on it for months at a time. There were even more times when I felt like just quitting the whole thing altogether. And surprisingly, what I thought would be my biggest challenges and what I expected to be my easiest tasks all turned themselves around, surprising me not just with unexpected challenges, but also with miraculous happenstances.

 

 

And while I’ve been frustrated with how slow it took for me to be able to complete this project, it’s been amazing to see how much I have improved over the course of these three years. It has even been gratifying that, in several cases, I had to re-edit some of my earlier images to better match the style and techniques of my more recent pieces.

 

 

Three years is a really long time to be working on any one thing, and so over the course of these last three years, I’ve had quite a bit of time to think about what I wandted to do with these images once they were done. Where I wanted them to be published, what format I wanted to sell them in, and where I wanted them to be used. Did I want them to be available for purchase, or did I want them to be free?

What I have decided is both.

 

 

Whenever I pick up a camera, or a new idea comes to me, my next thought is to always wonder “how can than this be an inspiration to others?” How can what I have learned and what I have created help others on this journey behind me? Art is a powerful thing that can change people’s lives. The stories within Alex Stoddard’s images had this effect on me. Walking down a path with an end destination of a job with the United States government, the work of a 17 year old boy opened up a divergence in the road to which I gravitated. While a job with the United States government isn’t something I’ve ruled out entirely and it certainly isn’t anything I look down open, I feel grateful every day for the passion and fire that conceptual photography brings to my life.

 

 

So in hopes of inspiring the young women for whom this project was created, I am offering my images for free as greeting cards. To download them, just fill in the form at the end of this blog post and the greeting card printables will be sent directly to your inbox. Once you receive my email, you can print and deliver to whomever you think would be most inspired by these, or perhaps print them off for just yourself.

 

 

However, if you are anything like me and can’t remember the last time you had a chance to sit down and relax, let alone download, print-off, and prep greeting cards en masse to send out, please know that I also will be offering each of my images as pre-printed cards and as signed prints, all of  which are available for purchase at my etsy shop.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT MY GREETING CARD SETS AND PRINTS AVAILABLE FOR SALE!

If you have been following from the beginning (or even from the long, outdrawn middle), please know that I have appreciated your support tremendously these past three years. Whether that has taken the form of purchasing my prints, booking sessions with me, or even just an uplifting and grateful comment, know that it has touched my heart and kept the fire going. It may have dimmed at times, but it has never gone out thanks, in full, to you.

 

Thank you for the love and thank you for being there always, even when I doubted.

Yours,