Three-time World Rolling Champion Omar Botello died in August, before this story reached print. This is how he built the RAWQUARIUM, the 400-hour aquarium of paper and flower he called his possible retirement piece.
This article originally appeared in High Times’ Summer/Fall 2026 print edition. Get yours here.
Editor’s note: Omar Botello, a three-time World Rolling Champion, died on August 1, 2026, in a car crash in El Paso, Texas. He was 31. He spoke with High Times for this story but never got to hold the finished magazine in his hands. We are publishing it online as written, with small updates to reflect his passing, as a tribute to an artist who, in his own words, never stopped trying to come up with something new.
Omar Botello spent roughly 400 hours building an aquarium out of rolling papers and flower. Nearly 300 of those hours went into the octopus.
After taking heat for the previous year’s winning gorilla, Botello came into RAW’s 2026 World Rolling Championship ready to show the rolling world something different: smoother execution, cleaner surfaces, and a centerpiece that looked freshly pulled from the water.
The result was the RAWQUARIUM, anchored by his RAWctapus — a glassy, technical, wildly detailed sea creature that may already rank among the greatest competitive rolls ever created.
RAW’s World Rolling Championship has quietly evolved into one of the strangest and most technically demanding art competitions in cannabis culture — a place where elite rollers spend hundreds of hours transforming papers and flower into sculptures that increasingly resemble architecture, biology, and industrial design more than joints.
While many rolling contests of the modern era come down to what’s inside, given how evenly matched so many of the world’s best commercial and competitive rollers are, the World Rolling Championship has become a contest built around expression. RAW developed the skill-based competition as a mechanism for participants to showcase creativity using rolling papers. Entries go through a rigorous judging process, with RAW emphasizing that no aspect of the contest is random or based on chance. Winners are determined through a combination of objective and subjective criteria.
The judging panel, led by RAW founder Josh Kesselman, scored entries based on overall quality, creativity, complexity, and potential smokability. The rolls on the podium this year knocked every one of those categories out of the park.
“This year’s entries were absolutely amazing,” Kesselman told High Times. “We’ve gotten to the point of rolling better than I ever thought human beings would. Humans never rolled like this before, and now it’s gotten ludicrous.”
Kesselman noted that Botello’s gorilla piece from the year before was also impressive, but the level of artistry across this year’s finalists took a considerable leap forward.
While RAW has sponsored elaborate rolls for decades, the pandemic cleared out the company’s usually packed event calendar. The contest was founded as a way to keep the rolling community engaged while everyone was stuck at home.
“We were so upset that we couldn’t all get together,” Kesselman said.
Among the judges was Grasshoppa, a veteran of the professional rolling scene and founder of the Luxe Rolls line of hand-rolled luxury prerolls. Her work has been featured in a variety of mainstream publications, and she has served on the judging panel since the contest’s inception.
“It’s an absolute honor to be a judge for the World Rolling Championship,” Grasshoppa told High Times. “Coming from the National Joint League, and being an old head in rolling, I pride myself on my ethics and the knowledge of paper and skill required. But most importantly, for this competition and going forward, how do we keep pushing the limits of creative rolling?”
Grasshoppa said the annual progression is one of the contest’s most exciting elements.
“That’s what I tell participants every year: don’t bring what we’ve already seen. Show me something great. Show me something we haven’t seen before. Push the limits.”
She compared it to basketball, noting that the game played at the Olympics in the 1970s barely resembles the modern NBA because competition keeps raising the standard. That’s the same energy the judges want to see from rollers.
“We go behind the scenes, deliberate for days, go back and forth, and constantly question the rollers because we want to be truly fair and push rolling culture forward,” Grasshoppa said.
Botello’s victory marked his third consecutive World Rolling Championship win after failing to place in his first year entering the competition.
“It was fun. I enjoy trying to come up with something, something new, something different,” Botello said.
Much of that motivation came from the backlash surrounding the previous year’s winning gorilla.
“After I won last year, I was already thinking about this year,” Botello said. “I was already kind of annoyed. There’s certain artists or people in the industry that have been talking crap. I guess, the texture I used for the hair on the gorilla, and how big it was, and stuff like that. So I was kind of like, alright guys, let me, let me show you something different.”
His new plan was to go for the smoothest execution possible so those who hated on the textures from the year before would be left speechless.
“So it was kind of trying to prove to them and prove to myself that it wasn’t a fluke back-to-back years,” Botello said. “I have no idea how I came up with the octopus.”
He noted he wasn’t really feeling the piece until he added the final layer of clear paper that gave the octopus its fresh-out-of-the-water appearance.
Botello started rolling the set in January and finished just four days before the submission deadline. He started with the starfish first before gradually building out the larger RAWQUARIUM centerpiece. He used nearly four ounces of flower throughout the build.
When we spoke, Botello said he was still unsure whether he’d compete again. After multiple wins, some rollers told him they skipped this year’s competition entirely because they knew he was participating. While he understood why, he admitted feeling conflicted about discouraging others from entering.
“This might be my retirement piece, we’ll see what happens,” Botello said. “We’ll see what I end up doing further with RAW. Hopefully I’m able to do some more stuff and maybe make it out to some of the events.”
Disclosure: Josh Kesselman, founder of RAW, owns High Times.
