Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. Have you ever had the odds stacked up so high you need a strength most don't possess?

New Guinea Impatiens

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

I challenged myself to see how my current watercolor approach would work with some flowers and it proved to be an unexpected journey. My thinking was that if I can make a compelling painting of flowers then that speaks to my skill level at this moment in time. Also, it simply sounded pleasant as gardening is a great joy of mine right now.

Instead of just jumping into it I decided to do a series of purposeful 7” x 10” studies first to properly ready. I had no idea what it would unlock in me and I’m excited to share this journey with you:

Up front, the thing I’ve learned to love about studies is that they’re not finished paintings and they shouldn’t be approached as if they are. Not a lot of fine-tuning or polishing is needed unless that’s part of what is being studied.

Initially I did a rather straightforward approach, mostly so that I could work out the composition and let the subject matter tell me what was important to the piece. Obviously the blooms and the foreground leaves were where the visual story was. This one is…well, it’s fine but nothing memorable. Just kinda there. But that’s good because all knowledge is valuable to have for this process.

For the second study I dropped a lot of the background information out of the composition and went with a comparatively different color palette. This let me look at it more as a painting and not just a depiction of some flowers. You’ll hear me say that about my wrestling paintings a lot, that I don’t want it to just LOOK like the subject but FEEL like how it is to watch them wrestle. Same approach but with some New Guinea impatiens! As a lark, about halfway through I splattered some masking fluid to hold the first coat and then lifted that up once it was done.

While I like this color palette it felt a little too muted for the piece, not as bold as the colors are when looking at the flowers in person. The absence of white also holds it back due to a lack of contrast.

That said, I liked what the masking fluid splatters did as it reminded me of a time a few months back when my window fogged over and how the flowers looked through it:

It created a dreamy Impressionistic vibe that’s stayed with me since seeing it. Glad I took a photo that morning!

I went into the final study with a very different intent than what I ended up with and that’s the joy of experimentation in the study phase. At first I was going to go a lot more restrained and composition-heavy with some warm and cool color planes, but that felt a little too tame and I couldn’t get the memory of that fogged-over window out of my head.

That’s how I stumbled onto the technique that I ended up using for the finished painting up top. I was looking at this middle-of-the-road painting and I thought, “What if I splatter masking fluid all over this, like A LOT of fluid and then do a coat of colors over the top?” The fluid protects what’s underneath but then there’s this random and lovely crackle of color over the top. The texture is unreal and captures the eye in a way I adore.

It’s for sure something I’ll experiment with more in the future, figuring out good color combinations and different usages.

TOOL TALK: If you like to paint with watercolor or just want to play around with them and also want to add masking fluid into the mix, there’s two tools I use right now. First up is what called a ‘ruling pen’ which is an old draftsman tool used by the likes of engineers and architects and illustrators before computers came around. You can still get them at art stores and online, luckily. You can just lightly dip it into the masking fluid and then you get nice fine marks. Super easy to clean up, too. Simply wait for the fluid to dry and it pulls right out.

For splattering or bigger areas I use a brush. Yes, really. I have a dedicated brush I use for this, because it still wrecks havoc on the bristles but not as bad. What I’ve learned is to dampen the brush and then massage in some soap, but not rinsing that soap out. While it’s still damp you can then work for a few minutes with the masking fluid as the soap acts as a shield over the bristles. This was a bit of a game changer for me.

Here’s the other thing with masking fluid, especially with the white of the paper: It looks like you used masking fluid. The edges are too sharp, is what’s happening there. I tend to remove the masking fluid after the first or second coat but before the last couple so that I can attack those edges and integrate them better into the painting.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Cope painting. Spiky stuff!

Card subject to change.

Rob’s Art on ShopAEW
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Rob and Jason Arnett's novella Rudow Can't Fail!
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Rob’s prints and shirts at Pro Wrestling Tees
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Bluesky
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Katy’s book Oldest Kansas City

Caught Stealing is a fantastic movie experience. It’s a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time story where Austin Butler’s character is catsitting for a neighbor who turns out to be involved in some serious crime. This creates a lot of setups for action, but what I found refreshing here is that the violence is primarily carried out by the bad guys and Butler’s reaction to it is horror. Like, it’s not glorified or done to look cool. It’s bad people doing bad things, and when our hero finally is driven to violence it’s awful for him. It’s a nice change.

I also watched She Rides Shotgun the other night. I’d missed it during its short run in the theaters so I was happy to watch it on VOD. It’s based on the book by Jordan Harper, which I’d really loved. (Harper’s the co-showrunner on the upcoming Criminal show based on the graphic novels by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, if you’re a fellow fan.) While the directing/ editing didn’t quite do it for me, the acting and writing were so strong that I still enjoyed it quite a bit. Taron Egerton’s character killed a family member of a white supremacist cell leader, which puts an open contract on he and his family now that he’s out of prison. His young daughter is now sucked into this world after her mom and stepdad are killed, as they’re on the run from and on a head-on-collision with the neo-nazis. It has one of the most haunting final scenes I’ve ever seen which is sure to stick with me for a long time.

I wrapped up watching Slow Horses season four as I prepare for the new season coming later this month. What a show! I’ll be honest, I wasn’t totally into the first couple seasons but it made a big change with these last two. The characters are all defined with their own dramas, each of which affects how they interact with the conflicts they’re thrust into. Plus it’s hilarious in a way that reminds me of Breaking Bad, where the characters are occasionally idiots but they’re in these very serious situations. Great balance of drama and comedy. I’m for sure ready to start the new season!

Mothballs by Sole Otero is a tremendous read. A young woman inherits her recently-deceased grandmother’s house in Argentina and moves in. She’s equally trying to find herself and to make sense of her complicated grandmother’s life, all while her country is erupting with political strife. It deftly covers the concept of generational trauma, going from her grandmother fleeing Italy during the rise of fascism there ahead of WWII and growing up in Argentina and how so many of her own traumas carried down. A beautiful and poignant exploration of knowing where one came from to understand where you’re going next.

Katy and I went to the First Friday art walk here in Kansas City for the first time in…about a decade? Maybe that long? It was a different experience than what I remembered, which is how time works I reckon. The first thing I noticed was that there weren’t many galleries open anymore, my assumption being that the rents got too damn high. So there aren’t many indoor spaces left, which has led to people setting up with booths in the alleyways and parking lots. Most of the stuff exhibited fell more into the craft/ maker fair categories than art, which is interesting.

There was a lack of art in Kansas City’s art walk.

Granted, there was a big art fair across town on the same night and maybe some of the artists were there instead, although a good chunk of those are people who travel in to exhibit. I don’t know. It was a noticeable difference. The arts district, the Crossroads, used to be where Kansas City’s art scene was physically located and now, maybe, it’s not. Maybe it’s gone elsewhere and I’m too far out of the scene to know it. Maybe it’s decentralized now, like most everything.

I mean, there’s no reason to expect things to stay the same and it’s even more illogical to try to force things back to how you remember them being (Hello, America). I suppose I’m taking a moment to reflect on something being almost unrecognizable due to the passage of time. It’s not good or bad, it just…is.

The world keeps spinnin’.

Love you more,
Rob