SBR Market Day 2023: Demon Slayer colours on canvas
My fourth-grade daughter sold hand-painted canvases at her school’s market day, part of the IB Primary Years Programme at Sekolah Bogor Raya. The theme she picked was Demon Slayer.
Most of her classmates sold food. She wanted to do something else. She has the whole English manga from VIZ, volumes 1 to 23, and watches the Netflix series, so she decided to paint Demon Slayer colour patterns on small canvases.
A month before the market day we went to KKV for supplies: 20 canvases at 10 by 10 cm, acrylic paint and the rest of the art materials. We went through the colour patterns together and worked out which characters to use.
Making the canvases
We started with basecoats, white or another colour depending on the character, and left them to dry in the sun. I showed her how to pencil in guidelines so the colour boundaries would come out clean.
Mixing the paint was where school maths turned up in real life. She worked out the proportions and ratios for each colour, checking them against colordesigner.io before mixing the acrylics.
We aimed for five canvases a week, one a day. The first week was slow because it was all basecoats and pencil sketches.
The story cards
A week before the event all the canvases were done.
Starbucks Reserve puts a card with each coffee explaining where it comes from, so we did the same thing: a small card with each canvas explaining what the colour pattern means. She looked the details up on the Demon Slayer Wiki.
There were 15 patterns in the end, one per character: Tanjiro’s green and black checks, Zenitsu’s yellow and orange lightning, Inosuke’s blue, Shinobu’s purple wisteria, Rengoku’s red and orange, Giyu’s water-ripple blue, and the rest. Each one follows the character’s breathing style, which is what other fans recognised straight away.
At school she worked with her classmates on the posters and the plan, with Pak Chandra and Ibu Lucia helping.
She priced each piece at IDR25,000. That included the canvas with a magnet on the back so it sticks to the fridge, a stand, the story card and a paper bag. She worked out the production cost at about IDR18,000 per piece.
Market day
The whole collection sold out in 20 minutes, the fastest of anything at the event. She did not expect that at all, and students kept coming back to the stall asking for more. We heard afterwards that a few of them resold the canvases at double the price.
What she got out of it
More than the sales:
- Maths, in the pricing and the profit
- Research, in the market survey and checking other prices
- Time management, in planning the production
- Writing a proposal and handling the money
- Marketing and talking to customers
- Product design and problem solving
- Writing the report and the reflection afterwards
The best part was watching her take what she had learned in class and use it on something real. She made the product, priced it, sold it, and did all of it on a subject she actually cares about.
Awesome El!
Credits: Some pictures are courtesy of Pak Chandra, Ibu Lucia, and SBR.