Andrew McLean and his wife, Janet, have won both popular and critical acclaim for the children’s books they have created together. In 1979, The Riverboat Crew was commended in the Children’s Book Council Picture Book of the Year Award, followed in 1982 by the short-listing of The Steam Train. Hector and Maggie and Dog Tales were both Children’s Book Council Picture Book of the Year Honour Books.
Andrew McLean grew up in Bairnsdale, Victoria. He studied at Prahran Technical College and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. After graduating, he taught art, painting and drawing and is now a full-time artist and illustrator.
Although Andrew and My Dog author John Heffernan did not collaborate on the book, John wanted to do a story about the Bosnian conflict using images that would make the story a comment on all such conflicts.
Andrew and Janet have travelled to Sarajevo and found it a hauntingly beautiful place, with its combination of crumbling architecture and surrounding landscape. So, when working on My Dog, Andrew wanted to make the illustrations ‘as naturalistic as possible, to give a sense of ordinariness, and at the same time try to make each image emblematic, with a sense of intimacy so that the reader could be right there with Alija’.
My Dog is the first book in which Andrew has used charcoal rather than an ink line for the outline, ‘because it allows for a more subtle, less stylised line’.
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