His official job description may be “digital creative consultant” but Anto Motulz – or simply Motulz — is also a comic-book artist, blogger and, to thousands of followers on social media, an accomplished sketcher. He combines the latter with his love of travel.

“Traveling for me is not just about ‘getting there’ but we also have a chance at ‘being there’. Meet the locals, talk to them, hear their stories and so on,” he said in an email interview.

There is the intimacy involved in sketching compared to shooting away with a camera, added Motulz, who has concentrated on sketching buildings for the past several years.

“When taking pictures with a camera, I feel there’s a gap, because taking pictures is so quick — snap, snap — then you move to other objects and scenery. Sketching, for me, is not about taking a scene or object. It’s a process of observing. You need time for making a sketch. Sit a bit, enjoy the scenery and then scan for every detail in every object.”

The process of observing is key, he said, for anyone in the creative industries. He has spent his entire career in that field after his childhood hatred of mathematics and love of drawing led to him studying product design at Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB).

Born Dwi Sasono and nicknamed Anto, he became Anto Motul in college because there was another student with the same name and his friends referred to the sticker for Motul motor oil in his car. The lack of availability of emails with Motul led to the moniker Motulz: “adding a z seemed so cool at the time, like Dragon Ballz”, he said.

In his early 20s, he decided to come up with a distinctly Indonesian comic hero, Kapten Bandung, with the local market already flooded by American comics.

“My [college] friends created a very muscular superhero, but because at that time I was so skinny I created a non-muscular superhero with no magical or chemical superpowers. That’s also the reason for the tagline of my superhero, ‘Pahlawan Pembela Kebetulan’ [accidental defender hero],” said Motulz of the strip, which pays homage in style to his hero, Belgian artist Herge and his most famous creation, Tintin.

After leaving university, he worked at a succession of jobs, all involving creative works; among them, he has been a sinetron (local soaps) producer and part of the local version of children’s TV program Sesame Street. He was enamored by sketching when he watched the “behind the scenes” on a DVD of Lord of the Rings in preparing a concept for Sesame Street Indonesia.

“I saw they used conceptual artists to design for the set, all of them are sketchers. I thought, wow, those sketches are so cool. They were sketched manually — no digital drawing, no undo, no layers.”

The 44-year-old, who works as a creative adviser at the kreavi.com forum for Indonesian creative talents, said he “pushed himself” to learn to use watercolors two years ago.

“Damn […] it’s so cool. You can learn to appreciate the beauty of broken colors and learn about patience. Like for some techniques, you need more time to wait for the damp paper to get dry.”

His career has been all about creativity and sharing his experiences with others, including his love of Indonesian food. In 2002, during an exhibition in Holland, he discovered a Dutch artist with Herge’s style, Peter van Dongen, and they have worked on several projects together.

Motulz said curiosity kept his creativity flowing.

“Meet new people, hear their stories, travel a lot, find the stories of many places and watching documentaries […] because for me one thing that keeps us creative is interest in many things,” he said.

Instagram, Twitter:@motulz
Blog: motulz.com

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