POW! Right in the Kisser

I was messing around with some oil sketching on 9x12 canvas paper over the weekend - this took about 2 hours total:

Here's the photo I used as reference:

The proportions are all out of whack, but I had fun keeping it loose and simple.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

I was in the mood to do a little speed painting and since I had recently seen the trailer for the new book Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (yes, books have trailers now) I threw this together:

 

I haven't had a chance to read this book or any of the others in this style (Pride & Prejuduce & Zombies, Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters, etc.) but they look kind of fun.

Who Dat Ninja?

Things have been busy, but I'm still working on the writing side of my western story and I'm still trying to knock out some pages based on some odds & ends bits of writing I have lying around in the mean time.

I'm working on another 2 page story that came about after reading a post on Digital Webbing that was looking for short stories for an anthology book. All of the stories had to have something to do with ninjas. I thought it would be fun to do something a little more historically based than the usual fantasy based ninja stories. I never heard anything from the guys putting the book together beyond the initial contact, so I shelved the story until now.

Being such a short story, it's pretty straight forward so I wanted to have some fun with the visual style. I love Kurosawa's samurai films and have always admired the sumi brush drawing style of traditional Japanese art so I'm trying to combine the two styles. I'm hoping it'll be a little looser, more expressive and moodier that my usual stuff. We'll see. Here's the first panel: