Whoa! Zabimaru Howls is really WIN. I'm faving this.........wait I'm not on dA, lulz. You need to correct the link for the big pic, there's an extra http in there and it's in quotes.
I thought that was you! I'm Spirit On Parole there.

Link fixed, thanks for catching that BKV!
Dead awesome period! Is the background done by hand or on the computer?
The back ground on this one is done by hand, and notice no drop shadow. There really was nothing but the removal of the "flash" lighting caused by the scanner. It took 2 passes to get all of it onto the computer and I had to piece it back together in PS. I then had to erase the "seam" caused by having to pu tthe 2 pieces back together. My scanner can only scan a 8.5x11 picture and this was 14x17.
Thanks guys... now for the real surprise... all told Zabimaru only took about 3 to 4 hours from inspiration to all done to do. Zaraki on the other hand was work at a little over 3 days all together. Thats workin gon it about 4 hours a day too. I was posatively inspired to do Zabimaru and it just flowed.

Adding Renji was a last minute thing.