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Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. For in truth, it's the beginning of nothing.

Most of the time with my paintings I can pretty much visualize what the finished piece will look like before I start but occasionally that’s not the case. My method for this scenario used to be a combination of a bull in a china shop and hoping for the best and sometimes that worked out but when it didn’t, boy, it didn’t. I don’t have any formal art training so my whole approach is pretty much learned from trial and error but last year I started educating myself on some traditional approaches.

Hey, I’m this far into my career, I might as well learn how to paint.

So what I’ll do now is a series of at least six tiny color sketches, to work out color combinations and composition. Then I’ll do a small study to see how those ideas work out, putting the concepts into execution but still not a final product. After that I’ll take everything I’ve learned from those prior two stages to work on the final painting.

Obviously, I did all of that with this new Swerve Strickland painting and I think it worked out pretty dang well.

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

At one point Bill Sienkiewicz was hired to make the movie poster for the Clint Eastwood classic Unforgiven and a few years back he shared the gorgeous pieces he did for that project. The studio wound up going with a photo collage that’s pretty iconic but man, these paintings are SOMETHING.

If you’re unfamiliar with Sienkiewicz, he’s easily one of the greatest artists to ever work in comics and has gone on to high profile work in other fields like album covers, commercial art, fine art and of course movie posters. He has a very unique style with glimpses of influences like Neal Adams, Ralph Steadman, and Barron Storey but all so very Sienkiewicz. Heck, Roger Waters once did a tour using his and Neal Adams’ art projected during the concerts. Kind of a big deal.

It’s interesting to think about the alternate universe where one of these posters actually did get used by the studio, because the movie went on to be such a cultural monolith at the time. I wonder what kind of impact that would have had on Sienkiewicz’s already-storied career.

As an artist, it’s also fascinating to look at how different each of these is, but all so distinctly made by him. I can also see that he was working from the photo reference that ended up being used for the actual poster. Again, I like the photo poster just fine but there’s an EMOTION that these evoke that would have been additive to the movie’s experience. I’m personally fond of the first two.

Ultimately, I guess I’m a guy shaking my fist at the clouds raging about how painted movie posters were just better. But they were so much better.

I experimented with making my own egg salad yesterday and I’ve got it PRETTY close to what I want. I had the idea to use my Sriracha aioli (1 cup olive oil mayo, 2 tbsp Sriracha, 1 tbsp honey, 6 cloves of shaved garlic, 1 lime zested and juiced, all mixed up in a food processor) instead of plain ol’ mayo. I added the aioli to the chopped up hard-boiled eggs to get to the consistency I wanted and did a taste test. The eggs soaked up a lot of the flavor so I added some coarse black pepper, all-purpose seasoning, and a bit of relish and dijon mustard. I went a bit too heavy on the mustard, but I’ll know better for next time. Probably only needs about 1 tablespoon and I did a bit more than that.

Love you more,
Rob