Interview: One-on-One with WWE Portrait Artist Rob Schamberger

It was only a few years ago when Rob Schamberger’s career soared to levels he never imagined. The aspiring comic book artist from Kansas City was looking for that big break that everyone wants but very few find. His moment would come when he used his pro wrestling fandom to develop a niche market — painting portraits of pro wrestlers.

Schamberger’s work was so impressive that he became an official WWE vendor and fans around the world desire his portraits of these larger-than-life characters. The WWE portrait artist is now preparing for WrestleMania week, where his work on his canvas will be as tough as the battles in the squared circle.

Painting live at WrestleMania Axxess

CraveOnline: I understand you’re painting the WrestleMania main event at Axxess this year? How does that work?

Rob Schamberger: I’m doing it during WrestleMania Axxess over the course of four days and it will be Triple H vs. Roman Reigns. This will be my third year painting live there. The first one was at WrestleMania 30, which was my very first appearance with the company. I effectively, debuted at WrestleMania [laughs]. There, I did a large 30-years of WrestleMania respective piece, which is actually hanging up at WWE headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. Last year, I did one with Macho Man for his inclusion into the WWE Hall of Fame. This year, we decided that painting the main events of each WrestleMania going forward would be pretty awesome.

CraveOnline: Is there pressure while painting in front of a live audience?

Rob Schamberger: It’s definitely different. I have to plan my pieces accordingly. I try to have it set up so the people that are there at the beginning of the first day will have a feel for what I am doing.

CraveOnline: What’s your itinerary like for WrestleMania week?

Rob Schamberger: It’s going to be the same set up as the past few years where I’ll be set up outside of the Superstore at Axxess. Fans don’t even need a ticket to come see me. I’ll be pulling long hours, from open to close each day. Fans will be able to watch what I’m doing and we will have prints available there that people can get. Another thing I’m doing on my own is if anyone shows up wearing one of my shirts from WWE’s Shop, I’ll have a print of The Ultimate Warrior, where I purposefully didn’t paint in his face paint and people can tell me their two favorite colors and I’ll hand-color that for them. I think that’s pretty cool.

“I just got it.”

CraveOnline: I understand you became a pro wrestling fan when you stumbled upon a Ric Flair promo. Can you elaborate on the moment you got hooked?

Rob Schamberger: I was 18-years-old. I didn’t grow up with it as a kid. It was a single-parent household and one TV and my mom didn’t want to watch wrestling [laughs]. I would hear about [Hulk] Hogan, Macho Man and Ultimate Warrior and I would see something as I was flipping through channels. I just didn’t grow up with it but my mom remarried and I was 18-years-old and like any kid that age, I was at my mom’s doing laundry and my stepfather was flipping through channels on a Monday night and landed on WCW Nitro. Ric Flair was in the ring cutting a promo and “bam,” right then I just got it.

Back in the 60s and 70s, my stepfather would go see wrestling locally in Kansas City and see guys like “Bulldog” Bob Brown and Harley Race and all of those guys. He grew up on that stuff. He would say, ‘I saw Flair wrestling Dusty Rhodes for the title here in Kansas City’ and I was like ‘Wow!’ The next week I was over there again doing laundry and flipping through channels and landed on WWE Raw and back in 1998 and 1999, they were just killing it and I’ve been watching every week ever since.

The moment his career took off

CraveOnline: How did you get the idea to start painting wrestlers?

Rob Schamberger: I tried being a comic book artist for pretty much my whole life. When I was 8-years-old, I knew I wanted to do comic books and I had moderate success but I still had to have a day job and everything. I came to a point that I realized I was never going to be someone that made their full-time living off of being a comic book writer and artist. It just wasn’t going to happen. I was looking at what else I could do to be creative and I had been doing gallery work on the side just to stretch my muscles artistically and I was doing pretty well but not enough to quit my job. I was trying to find a subject matter that I could focus on and really stand out. It hit me as a wrestling fan, that no one was doing serious art about wrestling. It was either “hipster ironic” or subpar stuff. I thought I would like this and others would like it as well.

This was also, around the time that KickStarter was becoming a thing and I thought it would be cool to do portraits of all the major American world champions and put it up on Kickstarter. I raised $20,000 off of that in a month. I realized people were into this and I got a lot of great support from people in the wrestling industry and was able to quit my job and get a studio and started focusing on this thing. Then about three years ago, SmacDown was coming through Kansas City and I thought it was a good opportunity to get some eyeballs on what I do and raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. I put together a gallery and reached out to Jim Ross to see if he could pass my information along to the company for the purpose to get the word out about the show. He did and Triple H tweeted out about it, which was fantastic and we raised several thousand dollars for Make-A-Wish. Unbeknownst to me and not asked by me, Jim [Ross] went the extra distance and called several executives and telling them ‘Hey you need to work with this guy.’ A few weeks later, I got a call from the head of Consumer Goods and they told me what they had in mind and it’s just been rolling since then.

CraveOnline: What was your day job before you got your break?

Rob Schamberger: I would purposefully look for jobs where I would get skills that I knew I needed beyond my art and also, ones I knew I would hate. I worked a variety of jobs in banking, delivery driving, worked in call centers and doing customer service stuff. It was just all pretty miserable type jobs. I’m not just an artist. I’m a business owner and a lot of those skills I caught from that help out considerably now but it also, kept me from saying ‘Well, you know life is pretty good working at this bank.’ That was a never a sentence that came out of my mouth [laughs].

CraveOnline: Is your wife a WWE fan as well?

Rob Schamberger: My wife Katy, she is great. We have been together 10 years now. We were a Match.com couple. They still haven’t put us on the commercial but it’s their loss [laughs]. I had on my profile to let her know that I’m into comic books and I like wrestling and I’m nuts about my cat, which are things that would normally be warning signs, right? She came on board anyways. This was around the 2006 Royal Rumble, which is still my favorite show and my friends and I would always get together for that one. I asked her to come along and she didn’t really want to but she showed up because we were still early in the relationship. She saw The Undertaker and went ‘Wait a second. I remember him. Is this the same guy?’ It turned out her dad was a wrestling fan and she had grown up watching it with him but back in the 80s, he was always too cheap to spring for a PPV but there was this channel that you could go to on your box to get the audio of the show. She grew up an Undertaker fan but had never seen him [laughs]. Ric Flair was in that rumble too and she remembered him too and by the end of the night, she was a bigger wrestling fan than I am. It’s still the case.

I have a few shirts now just because the boys give them to me because they don’t want to take them home or whatever but she has a full wardrobe. She wears them to the office. She wears them to networking events. She loves it and is proud of it.

The comic that brought inspiration

CraveOnline: You mentioned that your first love was comic books. Which comic book inspired you as a kid to take this path?

Rob Schamberger: I’ve got it hanging on the wall here [laughs]. I was 8-years-old and got my first comic book, which was The Incredible Hulk. It’s him fighting The Absorbing Man on the Hoover Dam. That was like ‘Wow! I get this.’ There was also, a classic X-Men series and it had this cover by Steve Lightle where Wolverine was popping his claws through this Incredible Hulk robot and it’s just the coolest damn thing I’ve ever seen.

Connor “The Crusher” and The Ultimate Warrior

CraveOnline: You have painted so many incredible pieces since working with WWE. Do you have a specific piece that means the most to you?

Rob Schamberger: I did it last year. It’s Connor “The Crusher” [Connor Michalek] and The Ultimate Warrior together. I had hand painted the jacket that Warrior wore in his final appearance on Raw. The plan was that I was going to be the guy doing the jackets for all of his appearances. He would have a different one on for each appearance and obviously that didn’t come to fruition. Everything about that stage was very close and personal to me. When I heard about Connor’s story and his family, it really hit home. When they announced that Connor was going to be the recipient of the inaugural Warrior Award, I reached out to my contacts with WWE and said, ‘What if I do a painting of the two of them together and surprise Connor’s dad, Steve, with it at the Hall of Fame?’

They had me hiding behind the curtain and after Steve gave his amazing speech at the Hall of Fame, they did a backstage interview and I came out and surprised him and his other son, Jackson, with the painting. He said something that really rang through to me. Not only does he now have something to remember his son by but also, Jackson has something to remember his brother by. That reinforced why I do what I do and why I’m so fortunate to be here.

A Christmas Gift for Vince McMahon

CraveOnline: Have any of the Superstars or Divas expressed praise for your art? Any moment stand out?

Rob Schamberger: Yeah, there have been several. Natalya bought a painting from me of Bret Hart that she gave to him as a birthday present. He passed along to her that the piece itself reminded him of what his hopes and dreams were when he was a younger man. That was pretty powerful. I also, did a piece of the McMahon family and Steph [McMahon] saw it and bought it from me. That was her Christmas present to Vince a couple of years ago. He now has that hanging up in his private conference room at the office. My wife turned to me that Christmas Day and said, “You know right now, Vince is opening a present from Steph and it’s your painting’ [laughs].

A Classic Heel Move

CraveOnline: I know you occasionally travel on the road to some of WWE’s shows. Do you have any stories that stand out?

Rob Schamberger: Last year with Battleground in St. Louis, the plan was to do a painting of John Cena there and I was getting it ready and WWE was interviewing me to promote that I would be out there and it was the final match between John Cena and Kevin Owens and Owens saw what was happening, walked up and grabbed my painting and destroyed it [laughs]. I had to start over from scratch but I think the company felt a little bad about that because the next night was when they had me on Raw with Steph and Triple H putting me over. Getting me and my work seen by 4 million people definitely helped out a little bit.

Hilarious Commissions

CraveOnline: Have you ever had a hilarious painting request from a fan?

Rob Schamberger: Early on in the Kickstarter days, I was still taking commissions and I had a guy ask me if I could paint him as a wrestler. I told him to just send me a picture of himself and he sends me a picture that’s too dark and I asked him to send another one. He goes, ‘Well, I also have an image of myself that I created for a wrestling video game’ [laughs]. I said, ‘This sounds interesting so sure, send it to me.’ I did the painting of his character and gave it to him and he was like ‘Oh, Rob. Thank you so much. I got this framed up and gave it to my mom and she loves it’ [laughs]. I thought that was awesome.

“I show them in my paintings the way it feels to watch them and that they were important and they mattered.”

CraveOnline: After WrestleMania, what do you have lined up?

Rob Schamberger: The week after Mania, I’ll be in Las Vegas for the Cauliflower Alley Club Reunion. It’s a really cool organization, which is set up for their Benevolent Fund that helps out wrestlers who have fallen on hard times. I’m really honored to be a lifetime member of the organization. Last year, I had a tremendous experience where I painted a portrait of Curt Hennig because I saw that his father Larry “The Axe” Hennig was being honored by the organization.

I had this moment where I was painting it and I started hearing this sniffling behind me and I turn around and it’s one of his sisters and his mother crying and looking at the painting while I was working on it. I didn’t really have any plans for the piece at the time but as soon as I saw that, I knew I wasn’t going home with this and the family was getting this. A lot of times we forget that they’re not just these personalities on TV, they’re human beings too. When Larry was being awarded with the Lou Thesz Award, we set it up to where I would sneak up on stage and give the painting to him and his wife Irene. Awesome experience. Irene hugged me as hard as possible and Larry was holding it up as if he had just won the world title and the whole banquet was giving a standing applause. I talked to the guys running the show and we decided we should do something like that each year. With Nick Bockwinkel passing away last year, who was heavily involved and the president of the organization for a long time, I said we should do a painting of Nick [Bockwinkel] and at the banquet auction it off with the proceeds going to the Benevolent Fund.

Many people in the business appreciate what I do and I show them in my paintings the way it feels to watch them and that they were important and they mattered. Obviously, I couldn’t do what I do without them so this is a great way for me to give back to them and go back to helping out wrestlers on hard times.

CraveOnline: What’s the ultimate goal for the rest of your career?

Rob Schamberger: To be happy. To enjoy what I’m doing. I have so many years where I was unhappy because I wasn’t enjoying the work that I was doing with the day job stuff. As long as I’m enjoying what I’m doing, I’ll keep doing it. If it comes to a point where I don’t enjoy doing wrestling art, I’ll explore other options at that point. The main thing is just happiness. You never know what’s going to happen with life so I try to keep a smile on my face.

Joshua Caudill is a writer for CraveOnline Sports, a surfing enthusiast, an avid basketball fan, a pro wrestling connoisseur and an expert on all things Patrick Swayze. You can follow him on Twitter @JoshuaCaudill85 or “like”CraveOnline Sports on Facebook.

Photos courtesy of Rob Schamberger