REY MYSTERIO: Rob Schamberger Newsletter 07AUG22
My style is wild, and you know that it still is.
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Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. I’m like Sam the Butcher bringing Alice the meat.
WORDS
Booyaka! Oddly, this is the first time to my knowledge I’ve done an action shot of Rey Mysterio. Weird, right? I think I’ve always been so fascinated by the mask I haven’t done the OTHER thing we all think of with Mysterio, which is him doing the aerial maneuvers that only he can do.
This is a piece that evolved as I made it. Originally it was just going to be a figurative piece of him with the splashes of color. Once I was done with that portion it just didn’t feel like ‘enough’ for me as a composition, so I then added in the buildings from San Diego. The six one nine! I thought those dark shapes would balance the design out better, which they did, but then due to the lighter shades of color Mysterio sort of vanished into the negative space. So then I added the speed lines, which made his figure pop back out, making the whole thing a sort of hybrid illustration and painting that I enjoy the juxtaposition of.
ICYMI, here's last week's Canvas 2 Canvas episode. Tomorrow's will go up on WWE's YouTube channel at 11AM CST!
UPCOMING VIDEOS
Roman Reigns acrylic
Iyo Sky
TBD
Veer Mahaan
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
SCHAMBERGER LABS: THE SERIES! SEASON TWO!
For my detailed painting of The Undertaker, this week I began working on the crowd and I share how to make it look right!
I’ve decided I’m going to call these my ‘Wrestling Landscape’ paintings. Makes me chuckle, but it also describes what they are aptly.
Here’s how it’s currently shaping up. It’ll be another couple of weeks before it starts really looking like anything, but the work at this stage is crucial to make the rest of it look right.
WANT A SIGNED PRINT?
In case you missed Thursday’s newsletter, I’m giving out signed prints to 100 of my paid subscribers. All of the details are here. From my end, the best part of this has been the comments that people are leaving about why they love pro wrestling. From meeting a spouse to a final road trip with a best friend before their passing. From the scholarly to the deeply personal, it’s maybe been the most amazing wrestling-related experience I’ve had outside of exhibiting at Axxess and I’m so grateful to everyone who took the time to open themselves up in such a genuine way. You’re the best, my friend. The very best.
WHAT I LIKED LAST WEEK
I finished up reading the 52 Omnibus a few days ago and what an ACCOMPLISHMENT this series was. Written by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka and Mark Waid, laid out by Keith Giffen and drawn by a pantheon of DC regulars it’s really something to behold. I read the original weekly 52-issue series as it came out and loved it at the time but wow, it’s a whole different experience reading it in chunks over the course of about a week. It’s a coherent novel, tightly plotted with incredible characterizations of its main characters and huge emotional moments.
If you’re unfamiliar, following the Infinite Crisis series all of DC’s comics jumped forward one year chronologically, with the trinity of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman out of commission for that period. This series, where each issue took place over one week in ‘real time’, tells the story of what happened during that mysterious year. Spoiler: World War III happened.
Orphan and the Five Beasts by James Stokoe is a rip-roaring bit of fun. Stokoe’s an interesting writer and artist, with a cool mix of manga and alternative indy influence giving a great dynamism with humanity.
X-Men: First Class by Jeff Parker, Roger Cruz and friends is also a ton of fun. I missed reading these when they first came out, a series about the original X-Men having various adventures and getting into mischief. Reading this went down like a good meal.
Reservation Dogs is back for a second season and it’s somehow already exceeding the near-perfect first season. I don’t want to give anything away, but the ‘Tom Petty moment’ is perfectly hilarious and unexpected.
The new Beavis & Butthead series on Paramount Plus is everything I wanted and more. Their first adventure is mistaking a bathroom for an escape room (they can’t open the door because it’s a ‘Pull’ instead of a ‘Push’) and it lets us all know that this is modern yet still true to original series. Instead of just music videos (although there’s a country video that’s among the best things the franchise has ever produced), they’re watching videos on YouTube and the way this allows them to comment on modern society is something to behold.
Huh huh, I said ‘Pull’…
Heh heh, I said ‘Push’…
…push it…push it real good…heh heh…
Here’s Elvis singing Suspicious Minds from the That’s the Way it Is concert in Vegas:
Wouldn’t it be rad some day to get a Get Back-style docu-series using all of the unused footage from the documentary portion of this movie? Hell, he even DID Get Back:
YOU GOOD?
Being honest and transparent, that’s what I try to do with you, I’ve been struggling in a few areas. After a month-plus of anxiety around my career stuff and Katy’s health (we’re both good now), those things were sort of sucking up all of the oxygen in the room and now all of the ‘other stuff’ has come rushing back in. It’s like opening your door in the summer and getting a blast of hot humid air.
I’m leaning into it in therapy the past couple of weeks, though. That’s how this all works for me: Identifying what’s happening and engaging with it both with my therapists and with Katy in our day-to-day lives. We’ve got an awesome couples therapist that’s helping us out a ton, too. There’s a lot of stigma around couples counseling, but just like with individual therapy it can be a great tool to take care of issues before they become all-caps ISSUES in very positive ways. Preventative maintenance, if you will.
Anyway.
At the moment I’m looking for the little joys in my life, to help me get back to enjoying life overall. Beyond Katy and the cats, comic books and Star Trek I’m loving the monthly figure drawing sessions I’ve been doing. Its pure creativity in the classic fashion, drawing from a live model and trying to create form, lighting and beauty on a piece of paper.
I’m way out of shape on working from a live model, having not done it for over a decade at least and it’s been wonderful redeveloping those creative muscles. If you’re unfamiliar with how it works, you generally do about ten 1-minute poses first. These are what’s called ‘gesture drawings’ where you’re just trying to get the basic ideas of the model’s figure across. It’s best to do this with charcoal or a soft charcoal pencil, holding it from the back and just making gestures to loosen yourself up.
You then do a couple 5-minute poses which are still gesture drawings but adding in a little more emphasis on form and detail. You can bring in other drawing implements here, but the initial gestures I find still work best with charcoal. I’ll use ink sometimes afterwards as a tool for value studies. Next, a 10-minute pose which is still loose but you’ve got more time to use other mediums and you can spend more time on detail and/or values.
The above piece was a 10 minute pose from Tuesday’s session, where I did charcoal pencil first, followed by ink and watercolor. I like the looseness and energy of it. I wasn’t overthinking things and was really in the zone.
The model gets a break after this, and then we reconvene for either two 30-minute poses or a 1-hour pose. Whatever the class is feeling and what the model is up to doing, ultimately. These are what I’ve been struggling with the past few months, getting too in my head and not loose enough. Half an hour seems like an eternity after those 1-minute gesture drawings but you can definitely still lose control of the clock.
Beyond all of this, it’s nice hanging out with a room full of artists at varying stages of their lives and careers. This class has a man in his 80’s who comes sometimes and blows us all out of the water, and this week we had a couple 18 year-old’s join us confirming my belief that the young artists right now are the most gifted generation of artists we’ve possibly ever seen.
Hey you, thank you for letting me be an artist. You’re giving me a life I never thought I’d get to live.
Love you more,
Rob
EXCLUSIVE PAID SUBSCRIBER CONTENT
Paid subscribers this week will get an exclusive 25% off discount code for prints and 24 hour advance access for the original Rey Mysterio painting. WE ARE GO FOR PAYWALL.
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