In order to make the switch from prop to character designer, Jess Marfisi needed to take a big break. “I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to do that,” says Marfisi, now a character designer for The Fungies. “I was just trying to play around and get some space to grow as an artist.”
Journaling has been a reliable outlet for Marfisi, a way to work out her thoughts. Rereading and reconnecting with her past experiences is a valuable tool for inspiration, and on this occasion she found an old entry from 2017. “I wrote about the feeling of wanting to escape LA,” says Marfisi. “And it dawned on me that, in a way, it paralleled my old high school era feelings of wanting to leave my hometown.”
Connecting these two past memories conjured an image of an old water tower in her town, one Marfisi had always dreamed of climbing but never did. Back in high school, Marfisi knew she wanted to be an artist and she and her friends spent countless hours conversing over bonfires about their plans for the future. She tied all these concepts together on a rough post-it note illustration before recreating it in Adobe Photoshop where she could fully bring those memories and the colorful horizon to life.
The two kids who are ostensibly the subjects are so small that in the initial thumbnail they were only dots on the water tower. The kids seem to be having a conversation kids have been having for decades, if not centuries, about what they want to do when they grow up and how they fit into a world that is so much bigger than they are.
“I always wanted to climb up the water tower and see what it’s like to see the town from that vantage point,” says Marfisi. Now she has, not by climbing up a rusty ladder, but with a journal and a Post-it note.
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