Kris Fulk - NC Artist and Illustrator

This post is for all my fellow Pinays. With your beautiful dark hair, your petal shaped eyes tilted at the corners, your beautiful brown skin. They teach us in school to call our brown skin “kayumanggi”. I’d be heartbroken if either of my boys said he was not part Filipino. They’re mixed like , who is currently getting some backlash for saying her mother’s side is Spanish — they’re Filipino actually. Spain colonized the Philippines for over 300 years.

So here’s to us beautiful Filipino women, and to us Filipino moms raising our children to be proud of their heritage.

An artist in her cozy nook: the kitty’s purring, and even though it’s only 7AM, the puppy’s already snoozing. 🐶🐈‍⬛💕

A quick painting this morning 😜

Marikris.com

Just updated my website. Would you take a look and let me know what you think?

👉🏼 marikris.com

🌸 **Make Mother's Day Special with a Personalized Gift!** 🌸

Treat your mom to something truly unique this Mother's Day with a custom line art drawing on 8 x 10 Bristol paper! 💖 From now until May 6th, you can get this special piece for just $90 plus taxes.

With local delivery guaranteed by May 11th, it's the perfect way to show your appreciation. (If shipping, please make sure to order by this Friday.) Plus, check out more of my artwork on Instagram at Instagram.com/krisfulkart and give me a follow to stay updated on new creations! 🎨✨

Don't miss out on this opportunity to give your mom a gift she'll cherish forever! Order now and make her day extra special! 🎁

My entry for ’s because who doesn’t love a quirky and festive llama 🦙

What I’m doing right now: a page from ’s Asian American Girls Series Book 1: The Missing Red Envelopes. I’ve been keeping it under wraps until I was further along into the interior illustrations but I have been so excited to share this project. Growing up as an Asian American myself, there really was a dearth of books featuring Asian American characters. There was Claudia Kishi from The Baby-sitters Club but that’s all I can think of off the top of my head.

So you can imagine how happy I am to be a part of this book. It features two exceptional young sisters and their cute little cousins, and as you can see from the dragon dancers on this illustration — it’s during the Lunar New Year festival (in NYC).

Mark your calendars for February 2024 when it drops on Amazon, and keep a look out here as I’ll be sharing some more illos before then :)

Thankful for all of you. I started this account years after my photography account, and I’m super thankful that you all had found me despite the atrocious algorithm and that you have been a part of my art journey here. I hope that wherever you are today, whether you are celebrating Thanksgiving or it’s simply another Thursday for you, you are happy and healthy.

This portrait is from 2022 and shows my client and her family and all their pets. So cute — I just love all their personalities and I hope you can see them even in this painting. Scroll right to see a closer crop of them. I really enjoyed painting each one.

Trying a loose painterly style for today’s entry. The endangered pinto’s spinetail are usually colored in subtle grays and browns and are located in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil.

According to Undying Tales: “In the Amazon jungle, Pinto’s spinetail is a foraging brown and grey bird. There is a Tupi legend of a bird that they call jurutahy. It is said to be brown and ugly. This poor bird looked upon the moon and fell in love with her glowing visage, and so he courted her, singing love songs indefatigably through the long nights. Despite his ardent musical proclamations, the moon scorned the little bird, night after night. His entreaties fell upon her beautiful and deaf ears.

The jurutahy is thus seen as a symbol of the romantic bliss that a poet experiences. Though the world might not care for his artistry, still he creates, still he sends his voice out into the void, for to speak of love is worthwhile in itself.”

Romantic or foolish? What do you think?

My sleepy baby “mandrake”, or the mandragora turcomanica” for ’ project.

According to Undying Tales: “Mandrake grows in the mountains of Turkmenistan with delicate flowers of purple born up on slender stalks in the springtime. But the plant is known more for what lies beneath the soil, in the roots that can be narcotic and hallucinogenic. The branching bulbous roots have a visual similarity to the human form. That eerie resemblance made the mandrake the source for a large body of superstitions, and inspired beliefs of occult powers. It was said to be a particularly favored plant for sorcerers and witches. Pliny, natural philosopher of ancient Rome, said that a black root was shaped as a woman, and white root was shaped as a man.

It was said the plants sprang forth from the blood dripping from a hanged man, and that to pull a mandrake from the earth without proper preparations would elicit a scream from the plant, causing paralysis, madness, and death to those who heard. For centuries mandrake was much sought after as a luxury item, because of its use as a powerful magical ingredient used in spells and charms to induce fertility, to grant wealth and power, or to control destiny. It was sometimes called Devil’s Apple, for its use as an aphrodisiac and love charm.

Medicinally, it was mixed with morphine to induce “twilight sleep”, but was dangerous in too large a dose. The symptoms of such, were that which the myths claimed would occur to those foolish enough to dig up the plant without proper knowledge of the lore.”

Just a Filipina flying into witchy season 😍 Happy Filipino American History Month!

They say you can take a girl from fashion design school but you can’t take fashion design schooling from a girl… Fashion illustration was probably one of my favorite classes in when I attended way back. To this day I think a lot about clothing design and try to incorporate that into my drawings. Funny enough, two of my biggest influences are fashion and comic books. I was a big collector when I was younger, with X-Men, Fathom, Witchblade, Gen-13 and Wildcats making up my collection. I should make a post about that one of these days.

Top and trousers from .

Please tell me this is real and not AI.

It’s KidLit postcard day! Hello, hello, I am a children’s illustrator and a member of . If you’re an AD or an editor, Hi, I am available for work 🤗. I’d love to help you with projects where you need whimsical art from animals to people of all ages. I work with both color and line art. I hope to see you all at the next SCBWI conference 💕

Where it started to where it went. My first thought for a thirteen year old character in an early to middle grade chapter book. I really liked her fashion sense but she had been too cartoon like for me, so I explored it further and decided to make her features a little more three dimensional. If I were to explore this further, I would make the final character’s head just a little bit bigger to make her look younger. I think she looks age appropriate on the left but a little bit older on the right, but her features match the other characters I developed who are even younger and they look k**e a family.

Little bit of trivia: Her sweater is very similar to a sweater I own from Farm Rio.

Happy 4th of July to me and my friends in the US! Today I wanted to share this work I created for an author who wanted to see how I would develop three characters who are sisters. Enjoy the holiday and as always, have a safe Independence Day!

I’m so excited to show you guys my new website! I’ve had this domain for over 10 years knowing that I will be using it for children’s illustrations. If you didn’t know, I am a professional photographer as well, so krisfulk.com is for that. I wanted something that wouldn’t confuse my two different brands. However, I know that Kris fulk Art is very different from Marikris, so I might have to rebrand everything to Marikris. What do you guys think? Can I keep Kris Fulk Art even though my domain name is different?

You can find me at marikris.com or click the link in my bio!

After I printed and framed my illustration for my husband’s Father’s Day gift, I went and hugged my new printer. I had bought it a couple of months ago so it can do double duty for my photography and my illustration work. It’s an Epson ET-8550 with the large tanks. It’s way better than my Canon Pixma Pro 9500 (though I did buy that ten years ago, it always leaned magenta, and it was a known issue with the printer. It expended massive amounts of ink too, so getting misprints was so expensive.)

I printed this illustration on Premium Watercolor Paper from Amazon and then framed it with this beautiful wooden pre-made frame from a local framer, .

I love to share what I use because I love supporting small businesses and recommend things that can save you guys money (like by not making the same mistakes I did with my purchases) 🥰

Happy National Selfie Day! This one’s kind of old but I like it because you can see me working on an art commission. I need to take more selfies 😅

A sweet Mother’s Day line art commission. Already shipped and delivered, and I can’t wait for her mom to see it 😍

Mother’s Day is almost here! Let the mom in your life know how much you love her with a line art of your littles. I’d love to create a one of a kind artwork that you can frame and gift to her. Visit me at Instagram.com/krisfulkart and hit the email button to inquire.

Trying to practice Tekenuurtje from . One hour of sketching to help loosen up :)

But we did have a time change last night so my body doesn’t really know what time it is.

Hi! I’m Kris and I have been drawing since as far back as I can remember. I had toys as a child, but they didn’t interest me as much as putting pencil to paper and drawing characters and making stories. Paper upon paper, those characters became my friends. When I moved from the Philippines to Queens, NY, I remember making superhero characters for my new classmates in the 4th and 5th grades, and I drew comic books of us fighting villains and just being amazing in our cool costumes.

Imagination is a wonderful thing (and it’s free!) As a parent, that is what I hope to nurture in my two young sons. I hope that if they get anything from me, it’s that one will never be bored so long as one has a pencil and a piece of paper.

And now… a moment of silence for my houseplants. “I tried” - a memoir.

A very limited number of bespoke art commissions are available for February. Only two large works (9 x 12 and up) and two small works (8 x 10 and smaller). If you’ve been looking for painted family portraits, house or pet portrait, or bespoke illustrations for your loved ones, find me at Instagram.com/krisfulkart and hit that email button to connect.

🌟Ornament order updates! 🌟

I am finishing up all the art today and tomorrow! Everyone who ordered should have their ornament (either delivered locally or shipped) on Monday. You will get a tracking number if it is shipped. I am *very* excited for you to get your ornaments!