We were about three days into the school holidays and I’d already run out of ideas that didn’t involve a screen, so when a friend sent me a video of someone painting with actual chocolate, I sat up. Not chocolate-flavoured paint. Chocolate. As in, melted, tempered, real chocolate standing in for oils and watercolours. The place is called Yesign Chocolate Gallery, it’s tucked into The District Docklands, and it turns out to be one of those rare activities that keeps both a five-year-old and a fairly sceptical mum occupied for the best part of two hours.
What Actually Happens at the Workshop
I’ll be honest, I went in expecting a glorified chocolate-melting session with a bit of finger painting thrown in. It’s not that at all. You get an actual canvas — a flat board of dark, milk or white chocolate, your choice — and a palette of coloured chocolate “paint” that behaves surprisingly like real paint once it’s warm. There’s a hot plate keeping everything workable, and you’re handed proper tools: a brush, a palette knife, a fine skewer for detail work. You can layer colour the way you would with acrylics, scrape back for texture, or blend two shades together while they’re still soft. It hardens faster than paint does, so there’s a bit of a learning curve, but that’s part of what makes it fun rather than fiddly.
The gallery is the work of Danyoung “Young” Chen, who trained in food science and product design before turning her love of chocolate into edible artworks — she’s done everything from a chocolate Starry Night to a chocolate version of Melbourne’s City Circle tram. She actually started out in a tiny shopfront on Little Collins Street before the space got too small for running proper workshops, and moved to Docklands through the City of Melbourne’s Shopfront Activation Program, which is how a lot of these smaller, independent studios end up finding a home in that precinct (Docklands News). It shows in how the workshops are run — Young or one of her team walks you through each tool individually, shows you where to lay the colour thin and where to build it up, and how to layer without the whole thing turning muddy, which honestly is a mistake I made almost immediately and got gently talked back from.
Is It Any Good for Kids?
You don’t have to freehand it if you don’t want to. There are pre-outlined templates — we went with a Pikachu and a couple of favourite cartoon characters — so younger kids can basically colour inside the lines with chocolate instead of starting from a blank board, which took the pressure off completely. My older one wanted to do his own thing and picked out a few cartoon characters to copy freehand, and somewhere in the middle of it started sneaking bites of chocolate straight off his fingers, which I can’t really blame him for. The official workshops run for around ninety minutes, but ours stretched closer to two hours because nobody wanted to stop, and nobody at the studio seemed to mind. It’s genuinely calmer than I expected a kids’ activity to be — there’s no toxic paint smell, just melting chocolate, and it has more of a quiet, absorbed feel than the usual paint-and-sip chaos.
Not Just a Kids’ Activity
It’s not only a kids’ thing, either. On the day I went without the children, I was seated next to a dad and his twelve-year-old, and on a separate visit my mum came along and painted a bunch of tulips while I did a self-portrait, badly. It works as a rainy-day school holiday activity, a low-key catch-up with a friend, or honestly just an hour to yourself with a coffee if you go on your own — the studio offers a coffee to sip while you paint, which on a grey Docklands morning is not nothing.
What You Get to Take Home
Once you’re done, your painting gets boxed up in a proper gift bag, and — this is the part that gets people every time — you can actually eat it. We didn’t manage more than a day before the boys demolished theirs. If you want to turn it into a gift instead, that works too; there’s a small retail section in the studio with handmade chocolates, including hand-piped letter chocolates, and a few local-designer trinkets worth a browse while you wait for anyone still finishing up.
Getting There and What to Know Before You Go
Yesign Chocolate Gallery is at SC G22B, The District Docklands, 3 Wharf St, Docklands VIC 3008, right by the 70 and 86 tram stops, so it’s an easy one if you’re avoiding CBD parking during the holidays. The retail side of the shop is open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 5pm, but workshop session times run separately, so it’s worth checking Yesign’s own site or their Instagram before you head over, since class times and availability shift around.
If you’re stringing together a full day in Docklands for the holidays, it sits close to a few other things we’ve written about — Library at The Dock is a five-minute walk if you want somewhere free and air-conditioned afterwards, and if the weather turns properly miserable we’ve also rounded up our favourite rainy-day activities around Melbourne, including indoor play centres and the ice rink, both also in Docklands. And if you’re mapping this against the calendar, our 2026 Victorian school holiday dates are all in one place so you can plan around the quieter weekdays, which is genuinely when I’d recommend going — we had the studio almost to ourselves on a Tuesday.
Would I go back? Already planning the next visit, if only for an excuse to eat my own artwork again.