World of colours for everybody


TINTURA painting and colour workshops are specially designed for babies and toddlers. They draw on children’s natural attraction to colours and textures, starting with observation and progressing onto active artworks.

TINTURA provides both the parent and the child with relaxed, fun time together and follows Scandinavian methods of art education to enhance parents’ understanding of their child’s non-verbal communication and emerging personality. You will have a great time together and bring home some quirky, unique artworks – with someone else cleaning up afterwards!






TINTURA was founded by Marika Tomu Kaipainen. Marika Tomu knows from her own experience that being a parent can be an exciting, joyful, daunting and exhausting experience – sometimes with ‘four seasons in one day’. It is important for the parent and the child alike to find gentle activities that help break the domestic routine without overpowering either with excessive stimuli. TINTURA aims to promote happy, relaxed and child-orientated interaction between parents and children through art-based exercises. Above all - that shared happy moments are fundamental to early bonding, and that creative family activities enable both the adult and the child to learn from and about one another. 

TINTURA operates in a baby-friendly setting, using home-prepared paints that are vegetable-, fruit- and foodstuff-based. In all of TINTURA arts workshops, Marika Tomu only uses colours that originate from foodstuffs i.e. food ingredients. Most of the time the berries, vegetables and spices (blackberries, strawberries, buckthorn, rowan, roseberries, currants among others) are organic. Those are in their various forms – dried, crushed, jellied, as fool, icy, warm etc.

The audience of arts workshops is mostly babies and toddlers. In the workshops they paint paper and cloth with various “tools” as fingers, brushes, plastic cars, curlers or balls and colors are examined with multiple senses by touching, looking, tasting, smelling and even listening. The foodstuffs are transformed into paintings, sculptures, arrangements, reliefs or art piqueniques such as a chocolate castle or “an arts cake”.


The purpose of the foodstuffs workshop is to encourage the participants to visual expression with, multi-sensory exploration of and plain marvelling at the safe materials. TINTURA workshops are for everyone from babies to grandparents but as mentioned, mostly the audience is the youngest of the family. The workshops are suited for visually impaired people as well. They offer a clear feeling of the color by scent, taste and feel. Babies and toddlers participate with their parent(s).

Tintura has also sessions for school kids and a adults - sensory art workshops and foodstuff art.


 ”Look” the child says and demands his parent to participate and to receive the newfound wonder and realization. Appeciative reception tells that he is precious and interesting. Shared object of attention and experience with being together. That is what carries a human being. In creativity we are never alone as it is the heritage of early childhood interaction and it’s born to support us. Creativity is our inner characteristic. We can experience art as an object that helps to create relationships between the outer and inner reality and onto the borderline of those two. We can see the artist carry and enable this state of creation with his or her actions. This state and creativity is tied to the limitless possibilities of the art to support and rehabilitate a human being.


This work is the reward for its maker: the uncontrolled laughter of the child and the parent, the trusting look of the elderly deep into your eyes, the little pointing finger and perceptive gaze, the unexhausted wonder, the confusing strength of the hug of a toddler and the touched parent, the tears of joy. The joyous moment of shared collective doing. The art carries and supports.


25.12.2010 Marika Tomu Kaipainen/TINTURA