Romero Britto Painting Inspiration

I first encountered a Romero Britto painting aboard the Disney Dream Cruise. It was a showcase of his Mickey Mouse project. After that, I became smitten with his work and ran into his stuff again at a local Christian bookstore where his art was now on ceramic mugs and notebooks of the sort. His style is pop art, an era which I love as you can see from the two Lichtenstein paintings I did previously. I love the colour and bold lines. So in my 8th month of pregnancy, I decided this would be the last painting I did for a while. It didn’t take very long, because I’ve got my process down to a T and my motivation was to get it done before the baby arrived.

Step 1: Choose a painting

Google a Romero Britto painting that you like and save it to your computer. I chose Romero Britto’s “Follow Me”. Determine if it is a landscape or portrait orientation as this will determine your canvas size.

Step 2: Gather your materials

Canvas, paint brushes of different kinds and acrylic paint. Get the main colours, since you can mix most of the other colours. Main colours would be Black, White, Red, Blue, and Yellow. You can make virtually any other colour with just those standard colours. I did however get a few other colours, like teal, purple etc because I knew I was going to be too lazy to mix them later.

Step 3: Tracing the artwork

Hopefully, you have access to a projector. If you don’t, rent one from a local store, or you can try to create your own like here. If you do have one, project the saved image from your computer to your canvas and trace the lines with a pencil. You will end up with something like this. Don’t worry if you didn’t get all the artwork onto the edges. As you can see, this is a 24″ x 24″ square canvas. The original artwork was on a landscape orientation. All I did was make it fit a square.

Step 4: Start with the basic colours

Like all the yellows, blues, reds etc. Anything that you don’t have to mix just yet.

Step 5: Start filling in the rest of the colours

This part will take the longest because you will get tired. And hungry. So take your time and make sure you mix your colours well. I eventually got lazy from trying to make it look exactly like the original painting, so I just did whatever colour I felt like as long as it was close.

Step 6: Add the black last

This is the last step because it “ties” everything together and cleans up any errors nicely. With my other paintings, I think I used a black sharpie and a ruler on some edges just to make the lines looked crisp, but I didn’t think my doctor would appreciate me getting high in my 8th month.

Tip: Like with the rest of my paintings, I say to invest a little more and purchase a gallery stretched canvas. It really makes a world of difference when hung on your wall. You can wrap the painting over to the sides and gives it more depth and a much nicer look.