This fall, my friend Jeff commissioned me to paint a gift for his wife, for a combination 5th anniversary and Christmas present. It was an interesting challenge keeping it a secret for two months, but the moment of presentation was a smashing success!

Here’s a bit of the process, for the curious…

The worst thing in the world: a blank canvas.

Look, color!

And here’s a little more, getting in the shadows and a vague hint of what will someday be the background.

You can see my references taped to the easel now, or some of them, anyway, and the blocked-in color for the ghost ship.

Some detail going in on the ship:

More ship, and some foliage!

Rawr! He’s a little toothless, but he’ll get his later.

And now we block in our mermaid! The real star of the painting.

Our shark has teeth, and the mermaid has some color now.

Texture on her tail, and a whole lot of kelp.

All done except for the lighting. Little fishies!

And here’s the final! Click the image for a bigger version:

Recently Copyblogger reminded me of a very important principle in blogging, writing, and many other everyday sorts of tasks: consistency wins.

In my everyday life, this most often comes up when playing Mouse Hunt on Facebook — if I sound the Hunter’s Horn every fifteen minutes consistently (or at least once an hour, so other people can take me along on their hunts), then it doesn’t matter if any given catch is a bust, because overall I’ll keep making progress in the game.

Blogging’s like that, too — it’s a hard habit to get into, but once you get started, you don’t have to produce Pulitzer-winning gems every time. You just have to keep putting that content out there, and some of it will spark with your readers. Assuming you have readers. (Hi, readers!)

Email can be like that as well, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend poking at it every fifteen minutes — instead of letting the mail pile up until there’s hundreds of old emails you never want to see again, make sure that keep up with replies, do the stuff that’s small as soon as it comes in, and keep filing or deleting whenever possible. You might find an email or two still falling through the cracks, getting deleted before the project it was reminding you to do is done or ending up sliding into your spam folder, but overall you’ll keep ahead of the game.

Cleaning can be that way, too — five minutes clearing off the counters can help, even if you don’t have time to mop, scrub and bleach to your heart’s content. But you have to do something every day, or entropy sets in.

So, if you’re a business wanting to start blogging, here’s my best advice: start blogging. Put it in the schedule, make yourself sit down and be consistent. It doesn’t matter if some of your posts are more like pyrite than pure gold, as long as you keep polishing them up and setting them on the shelf for people to see for themselves.