Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. I wonder how they have the power to shine, shine, shine.

Study of an Urhobo Culture Male Shrine Figure

Watercolor on 7” x 10” watercolor paper

With a lot of these statue paintings I try to give them my own spin but with this one I wanted it to be a celebration. I want it to speak to the warrior figure and its powerful spirit, or edjo as the Urhobo community who made it in the early 1900’s intended.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Megan Bayne painting. In case you were wondering, yes these statue studies I do definitely inform my rasslin’ art.

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

Tuesday night I went to see One Battle After Another and it’s top to bottom amazing. It’s way more topical than the trailers let on, centering around the sociopolitical events happening all around us. But instead of focusing on the empty bigoted suits causing it all (although those types are definitely present in their fleece vests), the story focuses small on a specific personal conflict and how it’s the inciting event for a major uprising. That narrow focus keeps everything relatable and grounded without getting caught up in the bigger talking points and issues. It’s also a perfect movie for this point in time as we ramp up for the annual War on Christmas.

I finished up watching Outlander season seven and man, what an accomplishment this series is. Both the scale and the humanity of it serve to make it truly epic. The main characters’ involvement in the American Revolution gives a heavy backdrop to the situations they find themselves in, but it’s the small stuff like Jamie and his son that creates an emotional connection. There’s a lot more time travel wackiness as well and lordy the death of a major character hits hard.

On Wednesday I listened to the audibook (audionovella?) for All the Ash We Leave Behind by C Robert Cargill, the latest in his Sea of Rust series of books. It’s a story about a nanny robot who chose to not participate in the robot uprising, who still wants to defend human kids, finding the last known human civilization on Earth. Naturally, things go awry and it’s a tightly-paced tale that does what sci-fi does best, which is hold up a mirror to our own world.

Friday I finished listening to the audiobook for Slow Horses by Mick Herron. It’s interesting to see how closely the show adapted it, and equally interesting the ways it deviated (mostly the end). It’s tightly-paced with three-dimensional characters and a lot of dry British wit. And big action scenes. And farts.

I finished reading the Batman: Red Skies DC Finest collection by Doug Moench, Tom Mandrake, Gene Colan and friends, which wraps up Moench’s first run on the character and also the character’s Bronze Age era as the post-Crisis on Earths continuity set in. It’s fascinating seeing what a tonal shift was about to come with the character once Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Year One changes everything. There’s still a bit of childish innocence to everything with a bigger supporting cast and a surprisingly goofy Harvey Bullock. The big selling point for me is that it has the Two-Face issues from Batman 397 and 398, which were two of my first comics as a kid that came in a package of three of four comics. The art by regular artists Mandrake and Colan are of course fantastic, though not the peak for either. Mandrake evolved into an incredible artist about 10 years later on The Spectre and Colan inked by Tom Palmer in Tomb of Dracula is impossible to beat, but these are still really strong works.

There’s also the notable Batman Annual 10 included, drawn by Denys Cowan that I’d never read before and is one of the best self-contained Batman stories I’ve ever read, about Hugo Strange using his knowledge of Batman’s secret identity as well as his own psychiatric background to environmentally destroy both Wayne and Batman’s identities. Another highlight is Batman 400, drawn by a who’s who of luminaries like Steve Lightle, Art Adams, Bill Sienkiewicz, Joe Kubert, Brian Bolland and a ton of others that is essentially the entire Knightfall storyline where a mysterious enemy frees all of the criminals from Arkham Asylum just to wear down Batman so that the main foe can step in to defeat him. Great stuff!

Your power lies in knowing that you can say, “No I won’t,” one more time than they can say, “Yes you will.”

When I first started doing a lot of watercolor paintings I just had a simple eight-color dry pan set and used ink for the black areas. I got a lot of mileage out of that setup but over the past few years I’ve moved into the fancy tubes and learning more about how they’re different from company to company.

Right now I mostly use Holbein and Golden QoR paints. I love the creaminess of Holbein and the vibrance of its pigments. The Golden QoR is something I’m new to and am still learning my way around as the colors do a lot of different things depending on the water-to-pigment ratio I use. They also have the best sepia in my opinion as it has the same consistency either straight out of the tube or dried-and-reactivated. Other brands get granular when they dry on the palette and inconsistent when reactivated.

For better or worse I don’t mix my paints on a palette, instead doing thin-to-thick layers on the paper and letting the pigments mix that way. I think of it like layers of CMYK transparencies put over each other to create a final image. Hooray for learning the printing process before Photoshop and digital printers eliminated the pre-press industry, I guess.

Gosh I’m far in the weeds here. Hang on!

I guess all of this is to say that you don’t need the fancy/ expensive supplies when you’re starting out, because in those early years (yes, years) you should be more focused on your own process and approach and then you can slowly swap out your old supplies with the nicer stuff. The last thing you want is to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on supplies that you don’t end up using, right?

I’ve had so many ways of making art that I was SURE were the only way I’d ever need and while I learned from each of them I don’t use any of them anymore. I think that holds true for a whole lot of stuff beyond art, too. What was the right fit once may not be the right fit now.

But seriously, that Golden QoR sepia is noice. I showed it to another artist a couple weeks ago and his eyes bulged.

Love you more,
Rob