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span class="caption" style="width: 398px;">Touched: A craftsman paints the face of an ogoh-ogoh, creatures used to scare away evil spirits the night before the Balinese Hindu Day of Silence.It was 9 a.m on Tuesday, and a workshop on Jl. Raya Sesetan in Denpasar was bustling with activity as workers crafted various ogoh-ogoh, giant papier-m'ché effigies that symbolize Balinese Hinduism’s mythical demons and monsters.

The effigies are the highlight of Ngerupuk, a parade held by the island’s youth to scare evil spirits away. The parade falls on the eve of Nyepi, Balinese Hindu Day of Silence. This year, Ngerupuk will be the evening of March 22.

I Wayan Candra, 60, kept his eyes on the activity while sitting on a couch in one corner of the workshop. “Stop carving it otherwise it will look ugly,” he instructed one of his workers, who was carving a 1.5 meter-tall monster.

“We have been very busy for one and a half months, and things will be like this until a few days before Nyepi. But we stopped taking new orders because we have been overwhelmed by the ones we already have. We have to work overtime until late at night every day to finish the orders,” Candra said.

Candra’s workshop, Gases Bali, is arguably the first to commercially produce ogoh-ogoh. The shop, which has 50 workers, also produces wooden sarcophagi for cremation rituals and traditional kites.

Producing ogoh-ogoh has become a large and lucrative business as many Balinese youth now prefer buying them to creating the ogoh-ogoh on their own.

Handy: Craftsmen are hard at work creating ogoh-ogoh before Ngerupuk, the evening before Nyepi, in Bali.This year, Candra received 100 orders for complete ogoh-ogoh and 350 orders for ogoh-ogoh headpieces called tapel. The prices range from Rp 250,000 (US$27) to Rp 12 million. The headpieces and ogoh-ogoh parts are usually ordered by traditional youth groups that are able to construct the body of the ogoh-ogoh by themselves but lack the skill to craft the face.

“The number of orders keeps increasing every year,” the father of five said, adding that his customers range from village youth and the Hindu community to hotels around the country.

Besides Bali, orders have also come from Jakarta, Surabaya and Lombok. Last year, Candra shipped an ogoh-ogoh to Belgium.

Candra’s ogoh-ogoh are made of modern materials, such as polystyrene foam, wire mesh and iron rods, instead of traditional materials, such as bamboo and dried rice stalks.

“The foam and mesh are easier to form into the shapes we want. These modern materials make our work easier,” he added.

Candra said ogoh-ogoh were an old tradition for Hindu communities in Denpasar’s Sesetan and Pedungan villages. The figures gained island-wide recognition following the ogoh-ogoh parade at the Bali Arts Festival in 1990. Candra’s creation, titled Dwarapala, won the top spot at the parade.

“The 1990 Bali Art Festival was my starting point in doing this business. After the festival, many people, particularly from hotels, came to my studio and ordered ogoh-ogoh. I had never thought about doing this business before,” Candra said.

Another ogoh-ogoh maker, I Made Mardiana, started his business three years ago. This year, he received orders for four ogoh-ogoh from villages in Denpasar and Badung.

“This is annual additional income for us. Our main business is making sarcophagi for cremations,” Mardiana, a resident of Banjar Tampak Gangsul, said.

The average price for Mardiana’s creations is Rp 6 million.

“The profit margin is about 40 percent. It is profitable, but it needs extra energy because creating ogoh-ogoh is more complex than making sarcophagi,” he said.

Masked: Ogoh-ogoh are on display at Gases Bali in Denpasar. The workshop is one of the largest ogoh-ogoh makers on the island.Despite the increasing presence of commercial ogoh-ogoh makers, many traditional youth organizations still create ogoh-ogoh on their own. One of those groups is the Ganapati youth organization from the Gemeh traditional neighborhood association.

“We are proud we can create ogoh-ogoh ourselves,” group coordinator I Gede Arya Sanjaya said, adding that most of the work was done in the evening and lasted until dawn because group members were in school in the morning.

The group had started receiving orders for ogoh-ogoh as well. “We first received orders last year following our victory in the city’s ogoh-ogoh competition. This year we received two orders,” he said.

The group will present Ganapati Duta, an ogoh-ogoh of the elephant-faced deity Ganesha, in this year’s competition. It allocated Rp 12 million to finance the construction.

“Making it ourselves is better than buying,” the ogoh-ogoh architect, Putu Marmar Herayukti, said.