Part 2: Creating Monthly Income from Your Art - Bread and Butter Art

In part one of this series I looked at what Bread and Butter art is and how you can utilize it to create a regular annual income stream that should, at the very least cover the cost of all your art materials and maybe start paying some of your living expenses too.

In this part I'm going to give you some tips as to how you can keep your ideas flowing in order to produce a regular stream of new artworks year after year. I'll be using my own artwork and output of forty four artworks per year as an example.

Keep in mind that just because this is your bread and butter art that doesn't mean you should produce work that is of lesser quality than any of your more considered artworks. Remember that this is the art that you're going to be using to get people interested in your work, hopefully leading them to purchase your larger works and eventually becoming a collector.

Tip 1: Choose a Theme that has a Market

To get started the first thing you want to do is choose a theme that you enjoy creating art about. For myself I chose cats, not because I'm a cat fanatic, but I do enjoy painting them and I seemed to have very little trouble selling my cat artworks.

Before you decide on a final theme to run with it's important to do some research to see if there is a market for that theme. Obviously if there's no market then there is no point in pursuing that theme. If you're planning to sell on Ebay, try doing an Ebay search on your theme and see what comes up.

If you can, look for a theme that you know is popular (or at least has a niche market) that is also something you enjoy creating art about.

Tip 2: Brain Storm Unique Ideas

Once you've decided upon your theme the first thing you need to do is brain storm as many unique ideas for artworks as you can. My advice is to keep it simple.

Using my cat artworks as an example you'll see that many of them contain one cat performing one activity. A lot of them have no detailed backgrounds which allows me to save time and focus on painting just the cat.

If you can brain storm at least ten unique ideas, that would give you ten paintings that you can get started right away.

Tip 3: Brain Storm Variations on your Unique Ideas

The next thing to do is brain storm variations on your original ten ideas. i.e. look at one of your original ten  unique ideas then plan a new artwork based on that but with some aspect of it changed.

For example, I've done a lot of paintings of cats with butterflies and you'll notice there are variations such as the cat in different positions or different types of cats or even different colour schemes.

If you brain stormed just one variation on each of your original ten ideas that would give you ten more artworks to add to your list. Though I'm sure, if you really thought about it, you could easily come up with more than one variation for each of your original ten artworks.

Tip 4: Combine Two Unique Artworks into One Artwork

This tip is exactly as it sounds. Take two of your unique ideas from your first ten artworks and combine them to make a new artwork.

Again using my artwork as an example. Say I have a painting of a cat chasing a butterfly and a cat chasing its tail. I can combine these two ideas into another artwork, featuring two cats, one chasing its tail and the other chasing a butterfly.

If you were to do that with all your original ten ideas I'm sure you could come  up with several combinations of artworks. You should easily be able to come up with at least ten more ideas giving you a total of thirty  ideas for artworks so far.

Tip 5: Introduce a New Element into your Theme

To gain some more ideas for artworks simply take away one element from each of your original ten ideas and replace it with a new element.

In my own artworks, I've painted many cats chasing butterflies but I've also painted cats chasing fish, frogs and mice, all of which are  a new element introduced into my theme.

If I really thought about it, I could think of five to ten new elements to include e.g. bees, toy mice, streamers, wool, beetles, crickets etc.

As you can see I could easily come up with ten more ideas for a total of forty ideas thus far. With a little more thought I'm pretty sure I could find an extra four ideas to get my 44 ideas for the first year.


Hopefully these tips will help you to keep your flow of ideas going and allow you to consisently produce a steady stream of artworks for your bread and butter art.

Keep in mind that your bread and butter art is not going to be your only source of income. However, if you manage to keep up consistent sales it can become a fairly reliable income stream that should earn you enough to easily keep you stocked up on art supplies.

If you'd like to see more examples of my art or would like to buy prints of any of the works you see here, visit my Redbubble Store.


Note: This article is based on part 2 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 2 of 2.