Leandro Machado Turned Pandemic-Era Unemployment Into Full-Time Career Making Cover Art

Posted on

Leandro Machado, known professionally as MACHADOXLEAO, is a Brazilian digital collage artist from Tombos, Minas Gerais. He is a Top Seller on Art Grab and a cover art designer for music artists worldwide.

Machado holds a degree in business administration and spent years in the private sector before getting laid off during Brazil’s economic crisis. The pandemic ended his next position, too. He turned 30 at home — fired, quarantined, and, as he tells it, grateful. He had been making cover art since 2018, but in 2020, the work took over. By March of that year, he had 10,000 Instagram followers. He has over 80,000 today.

(REAL) WORKSPACE by MACHADOXLEAO

His work is surrealist digital collage—vibrant, saturated, and layered with personal meaning. The name carries his whole biography: Machado, his father’s surname, meaning axe; Leão, the word for lion, which he learned to write at six years old, and which also means Leandro. The X is silent. It is his brand mark.

(REAL) WORKSPACE is a collection of seven digital collage artworks created for Silver Lining’s Global series. The collection explores the new modality of work that emerged in 2020 — the flexible, evolutionary workspace that the pandemic forced into existence. Each piece in the collection reflects a different dimension of what it means to work from wherever you are.

Machado is currently based in Brazil and available for commissions and cover art projects worldwide.

Silver Lining commissioned this work from Leandro Machado as part of the small.artists Global series, supported by GoDaddy & JPMorgan Chase & Co.

“With the pandemic, the workspace has become flexible and evolutionary. Suddenly people could work from wherever they were and that’s a big step for the future but you also have to look at it from another point of view. As an artist I want my creations to connect with people. That’s what this collection represents.”