ROMAN REIGNS: Rob Schamberger Newsletter 14AUG22

Trapped far beyond my fate.

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Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. You turned this lie to truth.

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WORDS  

If you’ve been paying attention to my art over the years, you’ve noticed that I rarely ever paint someone with a championship. The reason for that is that I want my work to be timeless versus timely and people win championships as often as they lose them.

At the time I made this, Roman Reigns has been the Undisputed WWE Universal Champion for over 700 days.

I think I’m safe. I think a painting of Roman with the title will be timeless at this point. Just a hunch.

If you were to ask me what the things are that I struggle with the most as an artist, I’d say wet hair, Samoan tattoos and championship belts. Guess what’s in this painting? But after a few weeks of “playing power chords” with my work, I wanted to push myself outside of what I’m comfortable with and to make something special. A champion of Roman’s prestige deserves nothing less.

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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  

• Dakota Kai

• Iyo Sky

• TBD

• Veer Mahaan

Card subject to change.

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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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Twitter
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YouTube

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SCHAMBERGER LABS: THE SERIES! SEASON TWO!

This week I finish up the background for my Wrestling Landscape painting of The Undertaker. What looks like blobs of color will inform the rest of the painting as I move towards the mid-ground and then the foreground!

Here’s what it looks like so far:

Starting to actually look like something!

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WANT AN ORIGINAL NEW AGE OUTLAWS PAINTING?

All of the details are here but the gist is that I want to know what you enjoyed the most last week in pro wrestling, and I’ll pick one commenter at random and send them an original ink and watercolor painting. And if you’re not down with that, I got two words for ya…

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WHAT I LIKED LAST WEEK

I started listening to the audiobook for Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner the other day. I’m not through with it, about a third of the way, but it. is. RAD. Not only is it a direct sequel to the movie Heat, this novel also serves as a prequel and fleshes out the key players and their motivations in ways I didn’t even know I wanted. Heat is one of my very favorite movies, and Mann one of my favorite filmmakers, so this return to that world in his debut novel is a true delight.

The Uncanny X-Men Trading Cards: The Complete Series book is a full-on precious object: It’s a hardback collection of all of Jim Lee’s X-Men trading cards, both front and back. It’s got annotations by Tom Brevoort, who wrote the backs of the cards. It’s got annotations by Paul Mounts, the colorist of the cards telling how he did all of this pre-computer (would you believe some of the backgrounds were pasted-on wrapping paper?!?). It’s got exclusive NEW trading cards, featuring Jim’s iconic X-Men #1 gatefold cover!!! Plus, the inside of the dust jacket is the titanic vertical X-Men poster!

It’s hard to properly articulate how important this card series was to me when they came out, and to get this gorgeous book collecting all of it in its glory is a special thing.

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YOU GOOD?  

As I’ve talked about recently with you, the past few weeks have been tough personally and the past week with my therapist’s help I’ve been actively working on some self-nurturance methods. It’s not appropriate for me to get into what led me down the dark path I was on in a dang newsletter, I’m working on it with a licensed professional as I should be, but I DO want to share some of what I’ve done this past week that’s been helpful.

I actively and consciously looked for things that comfort me. Things like going for walks in the morning, working in the garden, and allowing myself to fully enjoy painting without worrying about the commercial side of things for a week.

The morning walks have been lovely and pleasant. The weather has been really nice, making it even more enjoyable. There’s actually a lot of houses in my neighborhood with faerie gardens in their front yards, which I didn’t expect.

A lot of our various peppers have started ripening so I’ve been on a harvest kick for a week now. We had a large number of sweet banana peppers last weekend that Katy pickled (yummy on pizza and with Mediterranean food!) and yesterday we harvested a grand total of 101 jalapeños that Katy’s going to candy later today. If you’ve never had candied jalapeños, friend, your life is woefully incomplete.

And with my art, there’s so many components beyond just making it that I need to keep in mind that sometimes I don’t get to enjoy the process as much as I would like. That’s the nature of things, but I was focused on just the joy this past week before getting back to the commercial side of it all. The Roman piece took longer than I would’ve preferred (over a week!) but after the recent Charlotte Flair piece I felt the need to keep that level of quality up with my acrylics. Then I got more work in on my Undertaker Wrestling Landscape painting, actually a couple weeks ahead of what you’re seeing now and am viewing it as work I’m making for myself more than anything.

TL;DR: I’m working on it, and the ‘it’ is me.

Love you more,
Rob

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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 Roman Reigns painting. WE ARE GO FOR PAYWALL.