Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. Every now and then I fall apart.

Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra in Dracula (1992)

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

With Halloween in a few days I decided to make a couple paintings for the season. First up is this piece of Lucy from Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, after being buried in her wedding dress and rising again as a vampire. It’s such a powerful look and I thought it’d be fun to make a little painting of it. I used some splattered masking fluid to get the lace look, giving it an extra haunted feeling.

Godzilla

Watercolor on 7” x 10” paper

I also did this fun Godzilla painting because making Godzilla paintings is fun. I used a toy of him for reference and went with an ominous and destructive orange and red palette to get that proper Big G vibe.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Brodido painting.

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

Last Sunday Katy and I finished watching The Diplomat season three and I think it’s the best of the series so far. There’s a tumultuous Presidential succession after the sitting prez dies in office, leading to a series of events around hiding a damning set of secrets. Keri Russell is her normal outstanding self but I think it’s the addition of Alison Janney as a series regular as the new President (and just WAIT until you see who her husband is) that made this feel so much bigger than the prior two seasons.

Katy was out for various work functions this week so I had plenty of time to watch the multi-part Mr Scorsese documentary. It’s a wonderful mix of biography, filmography and how the two intersect to make his body of work so unmistakably his. There’s a particular moment that stuck with me where they talked about how he was often stuck at home in an upstairs apartment due to asthma, which made him so drawn to looking down at a scene as that was his only way to interact with the world by looking out his window. They then showed a series of shots from his canon illustrating how that carries through. Definitely worth any film nerd’s time!

Thursday night I went to a screening of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and friend, make a point to go see this in a theater. It’s one of GDT’s most visually-striking films and finding out that he took heavy inspiration from Bernie Wrightson in its development make a lot of sense. It’s a powerful new telling of what’s arguably the world’s first science fiction story and is full of truly personal and emotional moments. It leans hard into an examination of the father/ son dynamic and it doesn’t shy away from who the true monster of the story is.

Last night Katy and I went to see Black Phone 2 and I liked it pretty well. It leaned more into the supernatural stuff than the first one did but it stayed true to the characters’ emotions, keeping it fairly well grounded. The actors all did a great job and the cinematography is excellent for when one character moves between the waking world and the dream world, giving it a grainy look for the dreams as well as some clever audio differences, as if it’s being played on vinyl. The crowd had a lot of laughs and some genuine screams throughout, which adds to the whole experience.

Even though I’d read Spectators by Brian K Vaughan and Niko Henrichon as it serialized online, I found a very different level of enjoyment in picking up the nice hardback printing of it. There’s a lot of little moments I would forget when reading it a few pages at a time that gave everything a much bigger emotional impact. It’s a story about a young woman killed in a mass shooting and now haunting the world as a voyeur, mostly interested in watching folks sexing it up. In the future, the world’s possibly coming to an end and she and another ghost are trying to find what might be the Earth’s final threesome. It obviously hits on a lot of topics that are at the center of society’s dialogue, notably the way that anything having to do with sex is considered obscene but violence is prevalent throughout culture. Henrichon’s art is full of vitality, imagination and technical brilliance, elevating this tough story into several moments of true beauty.

Yesterday morning I finished up reading Out of Alcatraz by Chris Cantwell and Tyler Crook, a book I’d been very much looking forward to and it exceeded my high expectations. Katy and I happen to be in the midst of our annual Halt & Catch Fire rewatch, which Cantwell co-created so it hit a little harder. The story imagines a noirish tale of what happened to the three prisoners that escaped Alcatraz as they race to some sense of freedom but finding themselves in one figurative prison after another. Crook (aptly named) fully painted this, creating one stunning image after another and capturing the humanity perfectly that Cantwell brings to his stories.

Last Sunday I moved my studio space back up to the upstairs for the cold months. I call it Studio North, since it’s on the north side of the house. In the warm months I work in the sun room and call it Studio South for reasons too complicated to get into here.

It averages out to about six months out of each year in each spot, which helps break up the monotony. It gets too hot upstairs in the warm months because we’re in an old house with old ventilation, and then the sunroom has the opposite problem in the cool season. There’s also an issue this time of year where the Earth is a little different on its axis so the sun shines in through the trees right onto my drawing board, creating a strobing effect that’s impossible to work around.

But mostly it’s nice to just change up my perspective, even though I threw out my damn shoulder again during the move. The cats love the carpeting on their bellies, too, as you can see in the picture above.

Love you more,
Rob