I would like to express my gratitude to my friend Charles Mandel, who encouraged me to watercolor painting, and my Mom, who makes my work possible. I did not choose watercolor painting. But watercolor painting chose me.
I am a Belarusian artist. I studied at the Belarusian State Pedagogical University to become an artist-teacher. After graduating from university, I worked in a printing house as a designer for several years. I did computer sketches for covers, labels, albums and many other printing products. I was successful at my workplace, but the office atmosphere did not match my freedom-loving nature. I quit my job and became a freelancer.
I studied three-dimensional programs on my own and worked in the computer games industry for 15 years. I created lots of three-dimensional houses, monsters, ruins, and crumpled tanks. My child grew up. I saw that he plays a lot of computer games. My work began to burden me. I was not sure if I was doing something good for the children.
I left my work. It was a shock for my family. I started retouching and colorizing old photos remotely.
I met an excellent customer from the USA. For several years we restored old photos of American baseball players. It was a great interesting work. Some of my colorizations are in National Baseball Hall of Fame. You can find my colorings in the online magazine Daily Mail. 11:50 BST, 26 May 2017, which is a British daily. And you can find my colorings in magazines Baseball History & Art.
We did a great job. Next my customer began to encourage me to paint watercolors of American baseball players.
Watercolor portrait! Its impossible. Watercolor is not suitable for portraits. I was sure that it was impossible.
But I did not want to lose the job. I had to agree. I had some of the most difficult months in my life. I forced myself to learn painting with watercolor. I did not expect that I would succeed, but still I hoped that I could manage.
A few months later I had a product for my client. We made 96 watercolor portraits for one year. All of them were purchased by collectors. I look forward to a series of baseball cards made from those watercolors.
I received touching letters from the relatives of the baseball players. I think that we did an excellent job.
I had a disagreement with my favorite long standing customer and had no job for three months. I used that time to create my portfolio and was honored that my first independent work, “This Wheel Needs Repair!”, was accepted and included in the 2019 IWS Hungary Calendar. I am honored.
View Natallia Valiukevich Paintings
My fifth independent work, “What Does She See?”, was selected for the Fabriano Acquarello 2019 Exhibition. Painting “Discovering the world” was accepted for II International Watercolor Triennial – Varna 2019.
Painting “Coquette” won the second round of the competition IWS Poland 2019 Step by Step.
And also I became the winner of the Global Watercolor Society GAWA in the senior category and received a scholarship to participate in international watercolor exhibitions. Very exciting.