Your Full Name.
Maria Kovalyova aka Mashamaklaut

Tell us about you.
I’m 28, housewife. Army officer in the rank of captain, but left the service to spend more time with my son.

Where are you located?
I live in Kiev, Ukraine.

A great digital painter/ artist is…..
A person who can transmit the story and the character with one image.

What drove you to become a digital painter/ artist?
2 years ago I discovered photoshop and started making collages and retouching photos for myself.

After I bought Wacom tablet in September I remembered how I liked painting when I was younger and decided why not to do something similar but in contemporary digital way.

Tell us about your unique style and the creative process behind it?
I like combining photos and paintings. My pictures have distinctively bright colors and sharpness of the main characters, and are very detailed. The ideas are coming to my mind all the time, sometimes the stories are coming to me in my dreams. Mainly I like drawing girls in luxuries dresses and expensive jewelry. A lot of works I’m doing for myself, I’m posing for the photo and drawing some other faces from time to time.

I like doing private portrait commissions, when client is sending me the photo and is describing me what he wants to see in the end. My task in this job is to make something unique, create an ideal picture.

If you were not a digital painter/ artist, what would be the alternative career path you choose?
Well then I would have been a designer for women clothes. In my pictures all of the closes are drawn from the scratch. Sometimes I take pictures of drapery cloths, painting corsets, adding textures in photoshop, decorating dresses with pearls and jewelry.

How do you promote yourself?
I usually post my works to different web sites.

What do you think about the Internet and how it is affecting the visual communication business?
I cannot imagine my life without Internet. This is the way I communicate with my clients, friends, I take part in different discussions where I answer some technical questions on my pictures, and sharing tutorials on how that picture was made.

Could you share any insight for people just entering the profession?
You need to study a lot… It’s good if the person has inherited feelings of light, color and dimensions, but as well as you’ll need to know the rules of object disposition on the picture, correct color conjunctions that would supplement each other and would not distract attention on secondary objects.

Who is the person that you look up to in the photography world? Why so?
I’m not a follower for somebody, I just like unusual photos, brightly colored that inspire imagination.

What music are you listening lately?
Bonnie Tyler, Elvis Presley, Morcheeba,

Name 3 your favorite books.
Bram Stoker – Dracula
Paulo Coelho – Eleven Minutes & #12289
Andrey Kruz – Epoch of the dead, The beginning

What do you like the smell of?, i.e. coffee brewing, morning grass, etc. Why so?
I like the smell of freshly mowed grass, the smell of autumn, the smell of apple pie with cinnamon – these smells are bringing calmness in my quick life.

If you have online portfolio (website/awards/credits/client’s showcase), what is the URL?
Mashamaklaut.deviantart.com

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