#About Paul Stewart

Paul Stewart is the creator of Spike & Pals, and currently lives in northern Utah. When Paul was much younger, he fell in love with a Mali Uromastyx lizard at summer camp, and ended up buying it and bringing it home. The lizard, whom Paul named Smaug after the dragon in The Hobbit, became the inspiration for a whole cast of anthropomorphic lizards living in an alternate herpetological reality. Paul easily weaves both historical and pop culture references into his stories, and has a knack for creating lizard characters with endearingly human expressions.

Paul is in his element working on a team, and can usually take a seed thought and turn it something amazing. A recipient of years of behavioral and speech therapy as a child - Paul now uses his talents and his Spike & Pals characters to help kids who learn differently. Besides drawing Spike, and learning animation and game development, Paul loves movies, games, and fishing (maybe in that order?) - as well as lizards, of course.

#Professional Projects

Paul has worked on several projects for Playful Platypus, his family's media and software business.

#Practice Job Jumpstart

Paul recently helped his Dad illustrate and design the print layout for a 30-page e-book called Practice Job Jumpstart, which is written to help young people with autism find the work they love. For this book, Paul created a character he created named Parker, who represents the young person looking for a job. Paul created nearly 40 different illustrations for the book.

#Project Edison Interface Design

Paul is currently doing User Experience (UX) work Playful Platypus' latest product, Project Edison - an app designed to help parents monitor and administer their children’s electronics time. Paul has designed about 10 different screens so far for the second version of the app using the user interface mockup tool Sketch.

#Spike and Pals Speech Therapy Materials

Paul is currently developing a series of speech therapy materials, including flash cards and folder games, featuring his Spike & Pals characters under contract to Playful Platypus. Paul recently made the furst of these materials available to the public, and these therapy materials are already being used to teach
Paul's younger brother, who has autism.

#TractorMath Educational Game

Paul worked with his family to develop the iOS educational game - TractorMath. Paul did the majority of the artwork and animation for the game, which included over 140 individual animations. Paul produced the artwork in Illustrator, and then animated the hidden reward items in the game using Flash. TractorMath was available in the App Store from 2011 until just recently. While working on TractorMath, Paul also used Subversion to manage versioning for assets.

#NickleUp Educational Game

More recently, Paul also worked on the NickleUp game being developed by Playful Platypus to teach counting money to non-verbal kids. Paul produced Spike & Pals artwork and animation for this effort, including lip-sync animation for the main Spike character. Paul used the Adobe Animate CC (formerly Flash) plugin Keyframe Caddy Pro to assist with this effort.

#Project Prospector

In the summer of 2012 Paul assisted Playful Platypus with an experimental project involving Henson-style puppetry for an iOS educational app. Paul was the primary puppeteer, and also assisted with lighting and sound, as well as shooting DSLR video. Though the project had to be cancelled, Paul will always have the memory of hauling his puppet down a mountain-lion-infested Colorado mountainside in the dark.

#Personal Projects

Paul also enjoys working on personal projects in his spare time - some of his other personal animations are: