As Morgan Elliott paints, she can field questions and hold conversations with no indication she’s splitting her focus—but her eyes never leave the wall.
Close to the wall with her, you feel that ease, too. That it’s all no big thing. Her brush strokes look simple and unbothered. Then you step back, take in all she’s done, and realize, sheesh, this is a big thing.
Elliott’s work is colorful, groovy, high-contrast. Every element, big or small, shines on its own and contributes to a striking whole, a mark of her background in graphic design and illustration.
For four years, she designed cards for Hallmark. It was Christmas every day—Christmas cards, that is. She started The Wild Peach Studio on Instagram in 2020 as an additional creative outlet, and when it took off, she set out on her own. Today, she sells her prints online and, more and more often, paints murals across the Kansas City metro.
On the afternoon of July 31, Elliott had been working on the mural behind the counter at Messner Bee Farms’ new Lee’s Summit store for nearly three full work days—plus the week or two she’d spent collaborating with the owners on the design. By that point, she’d befriended Cosmo the shop corgi (hobbies: tug and naps) and just about everyone else buzzing around the unopened store. Co-owner Rachael Messner, who worked hand-in-hand with Elliott on the design, was delighted with what was going up on the wall.
“Working with them, they were awesome,” Elliott said, brushing lines onto a bee box. “I gave them some sketches and they helped me kind of, like, cut and paste what they wanted. … This was a pretty fast process.”
Her biggest mural is in the Crossroads—and with that one, she had an open canvas. It became the bright band of flowers, animals, and trees around the blue building on Baltimore that’ll soon serve Conchita Tacos.
“I’m so proud of that one and really excited for the grand opening,” she said. “I made a mood board, I did some little sketches for that and showed [the owner] the vibe I was thinking, and he was like, ‘Cool, when can you do it?’
“I spent 20 hours on my own time [designing it] to make it my best. I wanted to flesh out what I really wanted.”
Elliott says right now, she’s doing the coolest work she’s ever done. She works with businesses she loves. The folks at Mean Mule Distilling Co. know her as a customer just as much as a contractor. She went to the Westport Taco Naco, where her art covers an entire wall, for her birthday last March. At Hallmark, it was Christmas every day. With murals, it’s something new every day, and Elliott gets to choose it.
Elliott is newly pregnant, which will change how she does things for a while. Her mother assisted with the Conchita Tacos mural, and Elliott might ask her to pitch in more as bending down becomes an issue. She says her path has changed since becoming pregnant, but murals are what she wants to do.
Of course, it was hard to leave a salary. She says she’s had months of worry, months where she worried whether she’d ever make a profit. But Elliott’s goal is to have two to three murals on her schedule at all times—and for the first time, she’s completely booked out with mural work through October. Moving forward, she hopes to show people that murals have a place in homes. “I’m definitely going to paint a really cool mural in my own baby’s room.”
“I feel proud to have my work places,” Elliott says. “I feel like it was a long time to get it started, and now I do feel really hopeful about the growth of my business. Especially my Conchita one—it’s so big, and it’s in such a popular area outside. That fills me with a lot of pride. It makes me feel like things are on the way to where I hope they go.”