"No doubt I didn't know I was more than a children's clothing designer. "
A brief history of fairy tale art:
“Everyone has their own fairy tale. This is mine.”
Throughout my childhood, I played, invented stories, drew fairy tale creatures and listened to fairy tales read by my grandmother. I lived them to the inconvenience of others with the help of huts and messy adventures.
I also persistently learned to fly with my best friend (and we almost did) by jumping from all the fire ladders and higher-than-life rocks to a moss mound.
I played the piano and violin, I composed. I studied as a free student (at the Kotka Music Institute and went to music classes).
My creativity sprawled in my imagination, music, visual arts, movement and adventures in the secret fairytale forest, the Whisper of the Spruce.
I grew up in a large family in the colourful home of an artistic single parent – which was really colourful and detailed: my mother painted the walls and doors with her own art pictures.
My siblings were artistic, especially my older sister. Together and separately, we told stories, drawn, played and sang. I composed. Everything that wasn’t normal was normal for us. Later, this childhood starting point enabled more in life than one would think.
Childhood was, in spite of everything and everything, a fairy tale and an adventure!
The real journey of fairy tale art began in 1997, when I was a student mother of two small boys. I lived with my family in a rented apartment in Vantaa, and since I couldn’t stand painter’s white – especially on the walls of the children’s room – and I couldn’t afford beautiful wallpaper, I decided to do something about it. I knew that all versions would be better than what was available. So I asked the landlord for permission to paint the wall of the children’s room.
This is how my first mural was born – a wildly beautiful traffic city that no other little boy in the world had. Yippee!
And there was more to it at the same time… add great fairy tales and paintings to all Tinttu.com stores.
Soon I was asked to paint other spaces as well – including the HopLop indoor playgrounds and children’s hospitals.
With the murals, I financed the growth of Tinttu.com’s children’s clothing brand into an international one without external investors (which didn’t even exist at the time).
The clothing collections expanded, and I started creating prints for indoor clothes, fabrics and fairy tale stickers. This forced me to draw on paper. So my drawing technique evolved: from murals to paper, then to canvas prints, and finally to digital drawing. Each new skill learned diversified and raised the level higher.
I did not hold my first art exhibition until 2013 and the second in 2014 at the Sello Library in Espoo. From the exhibitions, I learned strongly that I am not an art exhibition artist, but much, much more…
A year later, in 2015, I published my first storybook.
And no doubt – that I didn’t know that I was more than a children’s clothing designer. I was a fairy tale artist. So I put the children’s clothing brand aside and focused only on Pomenia.
All these steps – from murals to paper, from canvas to digital art – eventually led me to create a visual representation of the magical world of Pomenia, with its fairytale characters and stories, a world that only I could create.
Now, years and decades later, fairytale art returns to the exhibition again. Why? Because I want to, I can, and the time is right. I’m not looking for it anymore and what I am, I know.
So the fairytale artist in me never disappeared, in spite of everything and everyone. Talent cannot be prevented – it can withstand everything, no matter how much you imagine otherwise.
"It's never too late to pursue your dreams and try your chances. By the way, those dreams don't have to be a certain size to be significant. It's enough that they are big for you – and that you don't ask anyone but yourself if you believe in your chances."
