At Card Kingdom, we pride ourselves on supporting the talented creators in the Magic community. This past fall, we began partnering with community artists to create exclusive tokens – in fact, you may have already received one with an order!
Our first featured artist is Andrea Radeck, who’s known for her work on Unstable and the “OMG KITTIES!” Secret Lair drop. Kittens are the focal point of her three tokens for Card Kingdom: the food token, the merfolk, and the knight.
We chatted with Andrea about her work and wanted to share some fun facts about her to help you get to know her better.
FUN FACT #1: She wanted to be a veterinarian growing up.
Andrea has always had an affinity for animals and was fascinating with biology as a child. She saved up her allowance to buy college textbooks and interned at an emergency veterinary clinic in high school. But the costs of going through veterinary school seemed too daunting, so she decided to give art a try instead.
While she may not work with animals for a living, her passion for them is clear in her artwork. Her own cat, Beezle, “who eats literally anything even like food,” was the inspiration for her Card Kingdom food token.
FUN FACT #2: She doesn’t just draw cute animals.
Andrea may be known for drawing Adorable Kittens, but there’s more to her than meets the eye. Before she made a name for herself in the Magic community, most of her work consisted of high-fantasy-style dragons and monsters. (“Unintentionally cute monsters that people say they’d like to pet, even though they’re mostly made out of teeth” is the description she gave us.) Her biggest influences are fellow Magic artist Jesper Esjing and Heather Theurer, a painter known for her realistic portraits of Disney characters.
FUN FACT #3: She’s working on a comic!
“I’ve been polishing this story I wrote out of college for years now, and it’s been cathartic as heck to learn how to [make a] comic and get it back out there on a weekly basis,” she says. “People seem to really enjoy it so far, and I enjoy doing it. This is the first time I’ve been able to close up the private commissions and work on something like this.”
You can learn more about the project on her Patreon page.
Where to Find Andrea
If you’d like to learn more about Andrea, be sure to follow her on Twitter and Instagram, and check out her Etsy store. She’ll also be at plenty of MagicFest events in 2020, so if you see her, say hi!
You can also learn more about Andrea — including which Planeswalker she’d choose as a quarantine buddy — in this episode of our weekly talk show, Magic is Gathering.