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The past six months have taken MILTZ back to his childhood in Japan when he would play the Formula 1 video game on the Nintendo Gameboy, his desire to become an artist running parallel with his dream of racing in F1. 

That those two worlds might one day combine in some form never occurred to the would-be Japanese artist, and so the realisation of that has been a surreal experience for MILTZ, especially so early on in his career. 

Unlike when he was racing on his Nintendo, his work designing the livery of our F1 car for the Japanese Grand Prix most certainly hasn’t been a game – even if a lot of the work has been completed digitally.

MILTZ, an extraordinary and extremely talented artist from Japan in the early stages of his career, has been selected as the fourth Driven by Change artist, tasked with designing the MCL38’s livery for his home race, the upcoming Japanese Grand Prix.

Vuse’s Driven by Change platform was launched in 2021 to provide opportunities to emerging artists through the global platform of motorsport, including the canvas of McLaren’s F1 cars.

Alongside Vuse - a brand of Principal Partner BAT – we’ve worked with three livery artists to date, Rabab Tantawy in 2021, Anna Tangles in 2022 and Nujood Al-Otaibi in 2023. Up until now, these liveries have featured in the season finale at Abu Dhabi, but for this year, the programme will run across the Japanese Grand Prix, the home race of this year’s artist, MILTZ.

Speaking from Japan over a Webex video call with the help of a translator, MILTZ is sharing his story with us, explaining his pathway to this point and the impact he believes it can have on his career, and hopefully other like-minded young artists.

Who is MILTZ?

MILTZ was working as a graphic artist for a major client in an advertising production company in 2013 when he decided to quit his job and become a freelancer to fund his backpacking dream. A few years on, he never did travel the world with only a bag on his back, as his switch to becoming a freelance artist led him down a very different pathway.

Growing up in Japan, MILTZ says he wasn’t born an artist, but he was a natural creative – at least in the way his mind thinks. Although he says he dreamt of becoming an F1 driver in his younger years, after playing the F1 video game, his passion for art was always going to take precedence.

This led to a career in graphic design after he’d finished his studies, but it never quite felt like the right fit. By turning freelance, MILTZ would be able to take greater control of what he worked on and created, whilst branching out into other areas, before he ventured outside of Japan to backpack around the world. The aim was to use this period to learn more about himself and decide upon what artistic route to follow next.

Except, he never got that far, realising that his true path lay much closer to home.

“It was in 2015 when I realised the need for me to create something that I felt I was rooted in, otherwise it wouldn’t be authentic,” MILTZ explains. “I was born and raised in Japan as part of a regular Japanese family, and this is why I focused on lettering, using Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana, syllabary that is unique to Japanese culture.”

MILTZ’s biggest inspiration is Kukai, a Japanese monk, calligrapher and poet who lived some 1,200 years ago between July 774 AD and April 835 AD.

“I was most inspired by Kukai,” he says. “At that time, letter forms were not as established and there weren’t the same rules when it came to words like there are in modern day, where our lettering is fully established and there are certain ways in which you have to write.”

“In that period, the Japanese were creating letters of their own based on Kanji, which came from China, and this meant that Kukai was free to create what he wanted with his lettering and his art, using whatever tools he wanted, which is what inspires me to focus on lettering.”

An artistic style rooted in Japanese culture

A traditional Japanese script, called Edomoji, forms the foundation of MILTZ’s style, meaning that you can not only read his art in an interpretational sense, but you can physically read some of it too. This style was heavily influenced by his childhood in Japan and by his admiration for Kukai.

“People who have known me for a long time will be able to decode the meaning of my art, but there aren’t any right or wrong answers, I just want to make people feel through my work, even if they don’t fully understand it – I want to touch people’s hearts.

“In some ways, I want to confuse them because I think my art is a mixture of imagery and imagination, and abstract and accuracy. This is why in my work I use some letters that are readable, and some that are not, because then people can imagine what they mean – like Kukai."

MILTZ’s unique style piqued the interest of Vuse and McLaren during our search for the fourth Driven by Change livery artist, even though it wasn’t necessarily a perfect fit for an F1 livery. F1 cars aren’t exactly a blank canvas, after all, given they feature driver names, numbering and key partners, such as Vuse, and this presented MILTZ with a challenge…

Working with McLaren

MILTZ had initially been taken aback by McLaren and Vuse’s request to work with him, questioning whether he was ready for such a task at an early stage of his career, explaining his thinking as “I like video games and it is like I met the big boss at the beginning of the game, not at the end of the game.”

Never one to turn down a challenge, he adopted the mindset that, succeed or fail, he would give it all he’s got, sticking to his principles and ways of working to design a livery that stayed true to himself and fitted the McLaren MCL38. And the direction he took provides a fascinating insight into the mind of the creative.

“At first, everything felt so big and overwhelming, a big company, with a big name, a big client, working on a big project – I’ve never worked with so many people in such a big team - but after speaking with the teams, you felt that everybody was so nice, and I felt ready. I was treated as an artist and welcomed in as a creator. But it wasn’t just me, this was collaborative, and that’s amazing.

“I came up with several different patterns, but the process was the same. There are two types of process that I follow, which are either lettering and calligraphy, or outlining and calligraphy. For this livery, I used the outlining approach, which meant that I would draw the outline first and then fill it in afterwards.

“Lettering is the biggest characteristic of my artwork, but this wouldn’t work on an F1 car, so I turned the letters into a pattern, which was more abstract, rather than focusing on letters so that there was no conflict of design. This is how I came up with these lines that insinuate a dragon, and the clouds as well. I felt that there was an affinity between dragons and drivers. Dragons symbolise drivers competing at speed. Then, the clouds insinuate the F1 car on the asphalt and pushing against the air.”

Digital renders of the livery were created by our design team before being finalised, with the livery then applied to a show car for MILTZ, Vuse, and the team at McLaren to see in person, a moment that proved to be understandably surreal for the Japanese designer.

“Honestly, it didn’t sink in at first, it didn’t resonate with me in that moment, it felt like someone else had designed it,” he recalls when asked for his reaction to seeing his artwork on a McLaren F1 car. “But as time passed, I looked more closely, and it started to sink in as I saw more closely what I had designed and drawn. All of the work I’ve done in the past all came flashing back, and I felt, ‘Oh I’ve come so far.’

“I wasn’t surprised, because I am confident in my work, it’s just that this moment and this success came faster than I thought it would. I feel like a child who has left their hometown, and then come back as an adult, as a successful man.”

Seeing his livery on the MCL38 at the Japanese Grand Prix, where it will be on show to millions of people around the globe, will elevate this feeling to another level, and MILTZ hopes that, just like the three Driven by Change livery artists before him, his story can inspire others to follow a similar path themselves.

“It’s very important to me, and I am very conscious of other artists’ styles, and of my inspirations, Japanese calligraphers and designers whose art is inspired by Japanese culture.”

MILTZ’s livery will be run on the MCL38 throughout the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend, 5-7 April.