Born in Bairnsdale, Victoria in 1946, Andrew McLean studied art at Prahran Technical School and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. After graduating, he taught art, painting and drawing and became a full-time artist and illustrator.
Andrew and his Melbourne-born wife, Janet McLean (q.v.) wrote The Riverboat Crew (1978), which was commended in the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) awards. Hector and Maggie (1990) and Dog Tales (1993) were both CBCA Picture Book of the Year Honour Books. McLean and his wife travelled to Sarajevo to enable him to achieve a naturalistic feel for the illustrations for John Heffernan's story on the Bosnian conflict, My Dog (2001), the first book in which McLean uses charcoal to give a more subtle, less stylised line.