Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. I demand a better future.

Study of an Alexandrian Funerary Portrait Bust

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

I wanted to combine a few techniques and see if they made a symphony or a cacophony. Worked out pretty nice this time around! I loved what I did with masking fluid on those flowers last week and wanted to see how they would work with something figurative. I think it gives it a sort of technicolor mildew effect, if that makes sense. Definitely something to continue to play around with.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Nigel McGuinness painting. I’ll tell you more about it then but I had a tough time finding my way into this one and ended up doing some color sketches and a study to work things out. You’ll see that the extra effort definitely pays off!

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
Cara
YouTube
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Katy’s book Oldest Kansas City

I was totally hooked by the first episode of Task last Sunday night. It’s sort of an underclass Heat set in semi-rural Pennsylvania, where Mark Ruffalo is on an FBI task force to take down a small crew while also grappling with his own massive personal problems. Fascinated to see where it goes!

Friday I finished listening to the audiobook for The Last King of California by Jordan Harper. It’s a story about two cousins, a young man who wants to get back into the small-time crime family and a young woman who desperately wants to get away from them, and how these desires usher in disaster. Harper has a wonderfully poetic voice for his prose that I’m so jealous of.

Earlier this week I also finished Desert Star by Michael Connelly and thought it was solid. It was the main basis for the first season of the Ballard show, but different enough to keep me engaged. The audiobooks for the Connelly Bosch Universe books have gotten especially interesting as they now have different voice actors for Renee Ballard, Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller. It’s also wild that I’m almost caught up on these, considering there’s over 30 of them!

UltraMega volume two by James Harren is a rad series of big moments that allow Harren to go wild on the art. There’s not a lot of narrative tying it all together, but in this case that’s perfectly okay as what’s being illustrated is just cool to look at. Not everything needs to be deep, sometimes it can simply be fun and this book is for sure fun.

Yesterday morning I read The Knives by Ed Brubaker and Sean and Jacob Phillips, the latest in their Criminal line of interconnected stories. As I’m sure I point out every time they release a new book, they’re probably my very favorite comics creators and it feels like their books are made just for me. It’s a story about a lot of things like a cartoonist trying to navigate his comic being adapted into a TV show, a rich relative being held hostage, a young woman getting revenge against a world that’s taken everything from her, and all of them trying to find out who they are now versus who they used to be. Oh, and there’s some murders, too. Of course there are.

Here’s the new Gorillaz song The Happy Dictator featuring Sparks!

I imagine that tomorrow’s therapy session will start off with how to process seeing a lot of my relations memorializing someone who said that people like me should be stoned to death.

Hey, rough week. The way you’re feeling about it is real and valid. It’s something that I talk about a lot, but take a moment to find the pure joys in your life and allow them to exist alongside the other difficult stuff.

I’ve been petting my cats A LOT the past few days. Katy and I have been eating some good food together. I’ve been tending the garden more often. The way those things make me feel are just as real and valid as the stuff that’s bothering me. They don’t negate one another either, but they both can be allowed to live in my brain.

And the stuff that I can’t quite get my head around? Well, I’m seeing both of my therapists this week and they’re going to hear all about it.

Love you more,
Rob