ROB ABEYTA JR.

(1972, US)

Rob Abeyta Jr. is painter, designer and art director living in the harbor area of Los Angeles. Currently, he is working with NIKE as the senior designer on a new line of sneakers & apparel to rollout later this year. In addition, he is a member of SA Studios creative team with Mr. Cartoon and Estevan Oriol. 

His past works have included collaborations with Spike Jonze, French Director and Academy Award Winner Michel Gondry and numerous music packaging designs ranging from the seminal punk band LOS CRUDOS, to The Transplants, to LA hip hop legends MACK 10, Cypress Hill and DJ Quick. 

Other works include the design of numerous skateboards and apparel while working as an Art Director for Fourstar Clothing at the Girl Skateboard Companies. While design and art direction take up his days, the nights are taken up by learning the process of tattooing with Mr. Cartoon.

MISTER CARTOON

(Los Angeles, US)

Mark Machado, better known as Mr. Cartoon or more commonly just Cartoon, is a Mexican American tattoo artist and graffiti artist based in Los Angeles, California. Since the age of eight, Mr. Cartoon realized he was an artist and went on his first paying art job at the age of twelve. Having grown up in the Harbor area of Los Angeles County, young Cartoon began airbrushing t-shirts and Lowrider cars before adopting the legendary "Fineline Style" tattoo art, which was developed in the California prison system.

Machado designed the logo for Cypress Hill. He has tattooed the bodies of Kobe Bryant, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Eminem, Method Man, Xzibit, Prodigy, Travis Barker, Scott Raynor, Bow Wow, Fredrik Ljungberg, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé Knowles, Danny Trejo, Adil Omar, Mena Suvari, Jules Jordan, Emilio Rivera, Kurt Sutter, Redman, Lewis Hamilton, and Gabriel McDonald as well as Snoop Dogg. 

In addition to tattoos, Machado's work has been used by Nike, Toyota, T-Mobile, MetroPCS and in Grand Theft Auto. Machado appeared in the documentary Scarface: Origins of a Hip Hop Classic and is a contributor to Mass Appeal Magazine. Together with friend and frequent collaborator Estevan Oriol, he owns Joker Brand Clothing. He is affiliated with Soul Assassins.

Watch this interview by Young & Reckless:

MIKE GIANT

(1971, New York, US)

Acclaimed worldwide for his prolific work in graffiti, illustration, design and tattoo, Mike Giant is one of the most complete artists of his generation.

As a child he moved to Albu­querque, New Mex­ico, where he stud­ied archi­tec­ture and later he landed in San Fran­cisco, where he was offered a job as a graphic draw­ing artist at Think Skate­boards. Even when he was very young, he worked as a writer in the world of graf­fiti and skate sub­cul­ture, becom­ing at the end of the nineties a tat­too artist, motor­cy­cle and bike cus­tomizer and, lastly, cre­ative mind of the lifestyle brand REBEL8. 

Mike Giant, who defines him­self as an “old hip­ster”, is known inter­na­tion­ally for the extreme pre­ci­sion and rig­or­ous black and white of his lines, that is affected by the influ­ence of pop­u­lar Mex­i­can art and Japan­ese illus­tra­tion. In his pro­duc­tion, that mixes styles and sym­bols of dif­fer­ent nature, we see a con­ver­gence of reli­gious iconog­ra­phy and death alle­gories, tribal sym­bol­ogy and Bud­dhist doc­trine, let­ter­ing and old school ele­ments, in a con­tin­u­ous inter­sect­ing of sacred and pro­fane, love and death. Seduc­tive pin ups and wink­ing femme fatales, BMX bikes, skulls, snakes and Cal­i­forn­ian urban visions pop­u­late his work, all made with extreme care, regard­less of the sup­port, whether it’s leather, paper, metal or cement. His draw­ings and mul­ti­ples have been shown in numer­ous spaces and gal­leries all over the world, from WDWA Gallery in New York to Mis­an­thropy Gallery in Van­cou­ver, to Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris to Mon­ster Chil­dren Gallery in Aus­tralia. Fur­ther­more, his works have often been used by lifestyle and cloth­ing brands, among which the bike com­pany Cinelli and the brands Tribal Gear and Upper Playground.

Watch this video by LandOfChrome:

HENRY LEWIS

Henry Lewis is a San Francisco-based painter/tattooer/graphic designer. In his studio is where Henry sits and paints and smokes cigarette after cigarette, ostensibly for hours and hours every single night, after he leaves Everlasting Tattoo.  

Henry'’s been working almost exclusively in oils over the past year, and has become incredibly adept with the medium. There’s something about oil paint that you can’t get with any other paint; it has to do with luminosity. The layers all build on each other and when handled with some skill, the canvas fairly glows. It’s also a very subtle medium and difficult to master. 

DERRICK SNODGRASS

(Kentucky, US)

Derrick Snodgrass is a self taught artist and tattoo-artist. His work has been exhibited in San Francisco, London and Mexico City. He enjoys drawing and painting surreal kaleidoscopic landscapes, as if seen from the passenger window on a trip to a fantasy world of somnambulation.

For the past 3-4 years Derrick has been best known for his artistic talent, but for years before then he was extremely active in the local music scene. After completing his apprenticeship at Louisville finest shopAcme Ink, he moved to San Francisco to push his skills and become a better tattooist. He currently works atTemple Tattoo in Oakland, CA.