Part 1: Creating Monthly Income from Your Art - Bread and Butter Art

Unlike people who work for an employer, working as a full time artist doesn't bring in a regular pay cheque every week or month. Creating Bread and Butter art is one way to develop a regular stream of income whilst promoting your art to new buyers and having time to work on longer, more involved creations.

It's a way to give yourself a regular income that should keep you going whilst you're working on those larger artworks that take longer to complete and usually sell for higher prices.

The key features of Bread and Butter art are:

• Art that you can create quickly.
   
• Art that you are happy to sell at a low price (around $40.00-$50.00).
   
• Usually of a standard and fairly small size.
   
• Based on themes that you've successfully sold in the past or that you know there is a demand for in the market.

Preferably you'll sell your bread and butter art at a price somewhere between $40-$50 because research shows that people are still very likely to make impulse buys at this price point. That's good because, through impulse buys, more people may discover your art.

You can then add these people to your mailing list and promote your more expensive and more considered works to them as they, hopefully, become more interested in the art you create.

As well, people who have bought smaller artworks from you, are more likely to buy your larger works because they've already had a low risk buying experience with you and are now familiar with the quality of your art.

From your point of view the purpose of bread and butter art is to create a consistent monthly income stream that you can rely on to, at the very least, pay all your ongoing expenses such as the cost of materials. Hopefully, though, you will make enough of a profit to start paying for some of your ongoing living expenses as well.

Bare in mind that bread and butter art is not going to be your only source of money but at the very least it's going to become a consisent monthly income stream that you can rely on. Other sources of income may be the sale of larger artworks, commissioned art etc. In other words the kind of work that takes more time and therefore usually is longer between receiving payment.

To get started with your bread and butter art you need to set a goal for how many paintings a month you feel you can comfortably create whilst still having time to work on larger work and other income streams.

Using myself as an example, I set a target of four, 50cmx60cm paintings per month because I know I can complete one of these in 1-2 days. Often, I'll plan to paint on weekends, starting on the Saturday and finishing no later than Sunday evening. For me that works fairly well, leaving me the rest of the week to follow other creative pursuits and income streams.

If you work that out over a year, noting that I only paint 11 months of the year (I give myself a break in December), that works out to 44 paintings a year. In terms of income, if I sold all paintings at $49.95 each, my annual income would be $2178.00 or $198.00 per month. Obviously not enough to live on but it would certainly make some inroads into paying some of the bills.

44 paintings may seem like quite a lot to complete in a year. However in part 2 I'll give you some strategies for how you can come up with ideas for so many artworks.

To conclude this part, if you're looking for somewhere to sell you bread and butter art the price point is ideal for online sites like Ebay or Etsy. The small size of the art makes it manageable to post and you can get started selling right from your first artwork without needing to build up stock (if you were thinking about selling from something like an Art market stall).


Note: This article is based on part 1 of a two part video series that I created and uploaded to my Youtube Channel back in January of 2008. This article has been updated with additional information however if you would like to watch the original video just click the link: Art Business: Bread and Butter Art - Part 1 of 2.