top of page
ART DIRECTOR & LEAD ARTIST
Paperbark
"My goal was to create a world where every frame felt like a picture from a classic children's book; warm, breathing, and unmistakably it's own"
TIMELINE
3 Years
PLATFORM
iOS & Steam
STUDIO
Paper House
RECOGNITION
AGDA - 2018
FREEPLAY- EXCELLENCE IN VISUAL ART - 2018
INDIGO DESIGN AWARD - 2019
DIGITAL EHON AWARD -2018
ABOUT PAPERBARK
A wandering wombat
in a very hot Australian summer
Paperbark is an illustrative, narrative exploration game following a wombat's journey through the Victorian bushland. Inspired by the golden age of Australian landscape painting and the warmth of Australian children's literature. It presents a sincere, meditative world where the player is invited to slow down and look closely.
It is a game without urgency. There are no enemies, no fail states, no score. Instead, players are invited to wander, to notice the cicadas and the cockatoos, the peeling bark and the long afternoon shadows and to simply exist inside a landscape that feels genuinely, specifically Australian. It is, at its heart, a love letter to a landscape that most games have never thought to look at.
YEAR
2018
PLATFORM
iOS & Steam
STUDIO
Paper House
GENRE
Narrative Exploration
MY CONTRIBUTION
Leading art direction means playing the long game: holding a single visual vision steady across years of first sketches, stakeholder reviews, and technical constraints; until a thousand small decisions become a world.
I led the visual identity of Paperbark from its earliest sketches through to the shipped experience on iOS and Steam. My work spanned the full creative spectrum: developing the painterly 2D asset library, conceiving mood paintings and colour scripts that shaped the game's emotional atmosphere, and building and rigging 3D character models in Maya for our contracted animator.
Beyond asset creation, I worked alongside the other directors to present to stakeholders, refine our production workflows, and ensure every frame held together as a coherent artistic statement. The challenge was balancing technical constraints with the warm, handcrafted quality we wanted the game to feel like.
ROLE
Art Director & Lead Artist
TEAM SIZE
Small indie studio
ENGINE
Unity
TOOLS USED
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Maya
Unity
After Effects
RESPONSIBILITIES
ART DIRECTION
CONCEPT ART
2D ASSET CREATION
RIGGING & ANIMATION
3D MODELLING
STORY BOARDING
UI DESIGN
MOOD PAINTINGS
TEXTURING
PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT
CREATIVE PROCESS
From vision to world
01
Visual Research
Gathering references from Australian landscape painters, golden-age illustration, modern storybooks and the Victorian bush-land.
02
Colour Scripts
Mapping the emotional arc of the game through light, temperature & palette, creating a mood language across every frame.
.png)
03
Concept & Asset
Develop characters, environments and UI assets that would hold and match the painterly quality of the shader design.
04
3D & Rigging
Build & rigging character models in Maya, bridging the 2D aesthetic into the dimensional space of the game.
06
Integration
Iterating in Unity alongside the team, balancing technical constraints with the painterly feel of the final shipped world.
CREATIVE PROCESS: IN PRACTICE
Colour Study
.png)
Concept Sketches
3D & Rigging
Integration
In Game.
PRODUCTION ART
Art & assets across every stage.
bottom of page