Where They Draw

Phil McAndrew

• My work space is just a corner in my tiny living room. I’d really like to eventually live in a place where I can have my own little “art cave” or a studio space outside of my home.
• I don’t use a chair. I’ve set things up so that I’m on my feet whenever I’m working.
• I got my drafting table from Ikea. It was real cheap, it’s nice and wide and there is a light box built right into the surface, which is AMAZING.
• I mostly work with ink and watercolors, but I’m not really that picky about my art supplies. Most of the time I use India ink because I can dump water on it when I’m painting and it won’t ruin my lines, but I do like to play with sumi ink if I’m just doodling or if I’m drawing something that I don’t plan to paint. I usually buy the cheapest brushes and nibs I can find because I really like to beat the crap out of my tools. My desk is where nibs go to die. I like to collect beat up old brushes, you can get some really neat lines out of them sometimes. I do have some really fancy art supplies scattered around too, but those were mostly all given to me as gifts or came from friends who didn’t want them anymore.
• I rarely use my tablet to draw final versions of illustrations or comics but I do use it a lot for roughing things out or for my “pencils.” I also like to do a lot of quick color studies in photoshop which I end up using as a map of sorts when I sit down to actually paint things. Until recently I was using an old Wacom Intuos 2. I’d been using that tablet for something like seven or eight years but it started getting pretty glitchy these last few months to the point where it was almost un-usable. Luckily my pal Dustin Harbin had a fancy Intuos 3 laying around that he wasn’t using which he graciously and unexpectedly mailed to me simply because he is a really, really nice guy. So yeah, as I mentioned above: my fancy tools were mostly all gifted to me.
• Most of the art hanging around my desk is stuff my awesome friends have made.
• The mug on the desk has a Norman Rockwell illustration on it and egg nog inside of it.
• Yes, that is a PC. I am not a member of the Mac cult.