Mister Cartoon

Early life Machado grew up in the Harbor Area of the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles. His parents were of Mexican heritage, his father grew up in South Tucson, Arizona. Machado's parents encouraged the arts, taking him to art house films and introducing disco and psychedelic rock music at home. At age 10 while learning to draw Machado got in trouble at Catholic school for drawing Jesus naked on the cross. His first paying job was at age 12 doing illustrations for a client of the print shop his parents owned, which lead to his father regularly giving having him work on logos and menu designs for local restaurants. While hanging out at the auto body shops Machado learned about pinstriping and how to paint custom cars. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s Machado saw the worlds of hip hop, tattoo culture, and street art in Los Angeles all fuse together. In 1988 his sister gave him work making graffiti for movie sets Oriol invited Machado to go on tour with him and Cypress Hill, and design an album cover for them. As Oriol was also their tour manager at the time, Oriol would document their travels and work through photography he would capture. Cartoon was doing murals on lowriders in Japan and Oriol would take the pictures for a local magazine called Fine, which would pay them $400–800 every month for shots of the cars. but would go on to charge minimum $1000 for a tattoo and prices in the tens of thousands upward to $20,000-$50,000 for stars like 50 Cent and Eminem.

Machado appeared in the 2003 Def Jam documentary Scarface: Origins of a Hip Hop Classic. He rendered the graffiti used in throughout the 2004 video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In 2005 Cartoon was brought on to create custom Nike Cortez and Air Force 1 shoes, it took over a year for the company to be convinced to work with Cartoon. Machado was a contributor to Mass Appeal Magazine during the mid-2000s. Machado designed posters for the 2008 film Righteous Kill and in 2009 he was commissioned by Universal Studios to do billboards for the Fast & Furious movie.

In 2011 Mister Cartoon was featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles exhibition Art in the Streets which was the first major U.S. museum survey on street art and graffiti. Machado was an executive producer for the 2016 film Lowriders, which was created over a 10-year process with 8 years of script revisions. The film started over meeting Brian Grazer by chance at a Nike event. In November 2019 Cartoon designed special edition basketball jerseys for the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team in Old English font, the process took over a year, in September 2022 custom jerseys by Cartoon were used by the team again.

In March 2020 Mister Cartoon created a mural for the Casa Vega restaurant. In June 2020, Cartoon collaborated with Vans to release two pairs of custom designed shoes. In 2020, Cartoon starred in and was the focus of the Netflix documentary LA Originals, chronicling his and Oriol's lives, the film was developed over a ten-year process In 2021, Constellation Brands featured him in one of their Fighting Spirit Modelo Beer Super Bowl television commercials. In April 2021 B-Real and Cartoon created a NFT collection of 3D animations.

In March 2023 Cartoon designed special edition jerseys for the Los Angeles Dodgers. In May 2023 Mister Cartoon collaborated on a clothing line with October's Very Own and Major League Soccer for three of the league's teams. In June 2023 Machado had his first solo exhibition titled Just My Imagination in Hollywood. Machado also collaborated with Turtle Wax in June 2023 and April 2024 doing a custom logo and line of car cleaning products. In July 2023 Cartoon released a book of past sketches and drawings. Machado opened a barbershop called Master Deluxe with longtime friend Arturo Arce in 2023. as well as designing a collection for Supreme in August 2024. In October 2025 Cartoon designed and released a clothing line with the Los Angeles Rams.

Artistry The style of which Machado's work is based on originated in the prison culture of West Los Angeles, the streets of East Los Angeles during the 1970s, emerging scenes of graffiti in New York City, He was also inspired by the 1940s, an era his father grew up with aspirations of the American Dream from a Mexican perspective. After having visited and lived in Japan, Machado found inspiration from Japanimation,