BRAY WYATT: Rob Schamberger Newsletter 12MAR23
BRAY WYATT: Rob Schamberger Newsletter 12MAR23
Fear is your only god on the radio.
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Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. Shut down the devil sound.
WORDS
I haven’t struggled with a painting in a long time as much as I did with this Bray Wyatt piece. Done with acrylics, I had to learn a new technique to get it to look the way I wanted it to. Inspired by the blacklight match he had at the Royal Rumble, I found that quickly all of my colors were too vibrant and basic to get across that look. About halfway through, I realized what I was doing would end up just being the underpainting and that I’d do a glaze of dark blue over it to unify the colors as well as to subdue their vibrancy.
Instead of watering down the acrylic, I bought some liquid glazing medium to mix in with my Prussian blue paint and used a flat brush to coat the painting and I was immediately stunned by the results. When watering down acrylic, the pigment doesn’t always evenly mix through the water, but it does with the liquid glazing medium and it creates a more even coat.
With that done, I then mixed in the medium with a few other colors to accentuate the magenta as well as the phosphorescent look of the paint on his arm and in the background. The result is one of the most dang terrifying paintings I’ve ever made. I apologize ahead of time if it haunts you after seeing it.
ICYMI, here's last week's Canvas 2 Canvas episode. Tomorrow's episode will go up on WWE's YouTube channel at 11AM CST!
UPCOMING VIDEOS
3/26 - Bret Hart vs Shawn Michaels WM12 Wrestling Landscape
4/9 (Maybe sooner) - Roman Reigns vs Cody Rhodes
We’ll figure it out from there. Probably something cool from WrestleMania.
Card subject to change.
Hundreds of prints and paintings at Schamberger Labs!
Rob and Jason Arnett's novella Rudow Can't Fail!
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Signed prints at WWE Auction.
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YouTube
WRESTLING LANDSCAPE
In-ring action! If the ‘action’ is me painting the ring! You may not know this, but the ring canvas WWE uses is actually a light blue but doesn’t look that way due to the strong overhead lighting. Because of that, I did a light blue underpainting and then used a large flat brush to apply white paint with big right-to-left sweeps. This is the literal foundation for the foreground, as it’s what Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels are wrestling on so I needed to start worrying more about little things like the texture of the canvas to continue to create the illusion of depth that this composition is dependent upon.
NEXT WEEK: The Heartbreak Kid! That’s right friend, I’m finally going to start painting the actual subjects of this here thing.
FIGURE DRAWING
Tuesday night I went to the monthly figure drawing session at Art School KC, this time joined by my high school art teacher Manning. I leaned a little more into using a conte crayon during the gesture drawing portion and really loved the results.
It’s funny, to this day when I’m working it’s Manning and another teacher’s voices in my head when I’m self-critiquing and now here he was physically sitting next to me. It was really surreal. We drove together and talked art the whole way there and back. What a great night!
WHAT I LIKED THIS WEEK
The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin is a very difficult but very good read. It’s a dark crime story, where the darkness comes from how emotionally honest Vlautin is with all of his characters. They come across as three-dimensional and realistically flawed people, just like all of us are. It’s about a young woman who has a hell night running all over Portland, trying to get enough money to keep her family’s house. I wish I didn’t identify with so many of the characters and situations in the book, which was what made it so tough for me to have playing as an audiobook while working, but GOSH it’s the high quality of the writing that made is so difficult.
I read The Nice House on the Lake volume 2 by James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez Bueno as soon as it came in, having loved everything about the first volume. It’s a perfect high concept: A group of friends in their late twenties/ early thirties who knew each other from college get together for a lake retreat, only to discover they’ve been brought there to survive the end of the world. Their benefactor’s good intentions go awry and each answer asks two more questions. Plus, Bueno’s art is outstanding, like Stuart Immonen meets Jock. A beauty to behold.
The Pod Directive podcast interview with Jonathan Frakes is a must-listen. Frakes is a GREAT interview, willing to go in-depth on his answers and doing so in a disarming and charming way. A regular raconteur, if you will. He talks how to survive a Star Trek cruise, getting thrown into movie jail after directing the Thunderbirds movie, and utterly hilarious stories about his time in the 70’s as a gas station Captain America. “The reason why it was better to be Captain America instead of Spider-Man? The opening in the mask! I COULD DRINK!” I had huge laughs throughout listening to it.
YOU GOOD?
For a variety of reasons this week I started doing warmup paintings each day. I never really did warmups in the past as I kind of figured I should be working instead on the ‘important’ art, but I’ve found them to be very helpful. One, because I’m not really worried about these beyond the making of them, I get in the zone better for when I switch over to my paying work, having gotten the mistakes out of my system for the day. Two, for my emotional health it’s nice to make art just to make it and not be worried about how I’m going to monetize these paintings. It’s a great start to the work day.
So, what else?
Codename: PROJECT INTERGALACTIC will likely get announced this week. Maybe Thursday. I don’t know for sure. I had a minor revision to make, but it’s functionally done so now it’s all down to marketing strategy. It was a super fun piece which should be evident once you see it.
Codename: PROJECT SABOTAGE is now actively being worked on. The insurance stuff got fully sorted on Thursday so now I’m doing a bunch of spreadsheet stuff so that my system, the intermediary’s, and the client’s systems all synch up so that we can launch. Hopefully we’ll be up and going this month but there’s a lot of back-and-forth with this sort of thing so I’m not sure.
Communication is key, as I’ve found in my various business dealings over the years. If one party doesn’t accurately get across what they need to the others involved in the deal it can lead to needless complications. I’m going through that with another party at the moment, where so many things could have been avoided if they had simply called me to ask some basic questions.
Stuff they don’t teach us in art class!
Love you more,
Rob
EXCLUSIVE PAID SUBSCRIBER CONTENT
Paid subscribers this week will get an exclusive 25% off discount code for prints, upcoming signed print releases at WWE Auction, access to the exclusive chat, and 24 hour advance access for the original Bray Wyatt painting. WE ARE GO FOR PAYWALL.
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