SHOP TALK: Rob Schamberger Newsletter 16JUN24
I took the stars from my eyes and then I made a map.
Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. I’m always in this twilight.
WORDS
Above is a warmup watercolor I did from a photo I took in Florence. I really fell in love with the silhouettes of the sky as shaped by the narrow roads while walking through the city. I plan to do several more of these over time.
I really enjoy doing lots of different sorts of subject matters as it constantly pushes the problem-solving part of my brain to figure out how to approach each. Doing the same kind of thing in the same sort of way gets stale really quickly.
What if I started taking private commissions again? Just on a limited basis? I’ll get back to you next weekend.
THE EMOTION SERIES
Interested
Acrylic on 20” x 30” illustration board
This is part of a collection of paintings I’m making to show how I experience different emotions as a person living with PTSD and childhood attachment injuries. My hope is that these paintings will facilitate further understanding, research and treatment for people living with similar conditions. It’s also been very helpful for me to simply understand myself through making them.
A little snapshot of what to expect with the upcoming Thunder Rosa piece. It’s going to be one of the good ones.
UPCOMING AEW/PWT PAINTINGS
Thunder Rosa
Danhausen - SIGNED
Malakai Black
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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Instagram
Threads
Cara
YouTube
ORIGINAL ART ALERT!
You’ve been asking and it’s finally happening: My original paintings are coming to ShopAEW starting Friday with Swerve Strickland and Will Ospreay! I’ll have more details for you on Thursday.
The Swerve one was my very first piece with AEW. Seems like something a hardcore original art collector would be interested in. Just sayin’.
WHAT I LIKED RECENTLY
The Boys Season Four debuted on Thursday and I’ll never look at Madrox the Multiple Man the same way again.
TCM’s podcast The Plot Thickens is back with a focus on John Ford. They make an argument that Ford is the single most influential director of the past 100 years and that’s hard to dispute, especially when a lot of the names one might suggest instead seem to all cite him as their primary influence.
Hardcore History: Mania for Subjugation is the latest from Dan Carlin’s excellent history podcast, finally delving into the story of Alexander the Great. This specific episode focuses more on his parents Phillip and Olympias to give some added context before focusing on Alexander himself. I’ve long been fascinated by Alexander but maybe a little more by Phillip who was incredibly accomplished in his own right. Phillip turned the Macedonians into a feared fighting force who soon took over Greece and even began the invasion of Persia. Dude is even directly credited with creating the Macedonian phalanx, which completely changed warfare in the region. The story of his assassination is one of the wildest in history.
Shazam volume one by Mark Waid and Dan Mora is seriously fun. Not only does Waid nail the tone of the Captain, but he also gives Mora some outrageous things to draw like T-Rex’s piloting flying saucers and gorillas invading the moon. Yeah. Really.
Bill Sienkiewicz’s Mutants and Moon Knights and Assassins Artisan Edition is such a perfect art book. I was originally exposed to Sienkiewicz’s art during his brief run on New Mutants and this book has a lot of those original pages and painted covers so that I can finally really examine them and lament at how the poor printing tech of the time did this masterful art no justice. There’s also a bunch of Moon Knight originals and it’s fascinating to see him move away from his heavy Neal Adams influence and start incorporating a lot of elements from Sergio Toppi, Ralph Steadman and Barron Storey. And then there’s the Elektra: Assassin painted pages and covers. Wow. Still one of the most gorgeous comics ever made and to see these in their raw glory is such a treat. Highly recommended for any art fans, especially comic art fans.
Sometimes it’s about an idea of a figure.
YOU GOOD?
Here’s a couple poses from Tuesday night’s figure drawing session with Joanna. The first one was a 5 minute pose done with a parallel pen and water-soluble ink. I like these calligraphy-type pens because the tips lend themselves to some unpredictable lines, which lends well to my approach. They use a water-soluble ink bleeds out when you run a water-filled brush alongside with a lush blue-grey tint that I dig.
The second one was a 10 minute pose done with watercolor. I used the sketching techniques Olga Litvinenko taught me for this one, keeping it loose and about the pose, the colors and the composition and not worrying about details or likeness. It’s a great exercise to mentally prepare myself for more detailed works.
It all goes to what I was talking about up top: Doing things differently. My philosophy with art is that I’m not making individual paintings, I’m making a body of work. Each time I paint I look at what went right and what went wrong with everything else I made before, and what I can learn from that with what I’m doing now. Doing things differently from my ‘main work’ teaches me things that I can bring back to my core style.
Ideally, that keeps things interesting for me and you both. We don’t want to get bored of each other, do we?
Love you more,
Rob