Katsuya Terada: The Japanese Illustrator Combining the Cute and Uncanny
Katsuya Terada is one of my favourite Japanese illustrators. Inspired by Moebius and Katsuhiro Otomo (who isn’t!?), Terada knew he wanted to work in art and illustration from a young age. His prolific career and prolific doodling habit consistently earn him a spot as one of the most engaging, dynamic, and inspiring Japanese illustrators I follow.
“When I see a blank piece of paper, my hand starts to tingle…”
In a collected book of Terada’s work entitled Sketch, published by PIE International, Terada is quoted:
“When I see a blank piece of paper, my hand starts to tingle. Actually, when I think about it, as long as it’s a blank surface, it needn’t even be paper. It could be a wall or a fusama sliding door. Actually, it does not even have to be a flat surface. As long as I can draw on it.”
This quote summarizes what is perhaps the most compelling feature of the two art books of collected Terada works in my collection, Sketch and This and That. Inside, you will discover an array of drawing materials and drawing surfaces. The lingering texture of canvas, the torn spiral-punch holes of notebook paper, the edges of a digital screen - Terada really does draw with almost any tool on almost any surface.
As illustrators, this level of dedication to doodling is something we should all aspire to.
In one of my classes at art school, I will never forget a student asking the professor if it was OK that we doodled while he was presenting. He said that not only was it OK, but he would think we were wasting our time if we weren’t drawing while he was talking.
“This combination is my life partner…”
In the book This and That, also published by PIE International, Terada refers to the combination of Procreate, Apple Pencil, and Apple iPad Pro as his “life partner.”
For those who have not yet experienced the life-changing magic of this combination of creation tools, I recommend considering it. Maybe you have ample free space, free time, and tools to work with and don’t find physical limitations to get in the way of your creative flow. But for me, and apparently for Terada, too, having the full suite of my creative tools constantly on hand in the form of my extremely portable and convenient iPad and Apple Pencil was a game-changer. I began to draw in fifteen-minute coffee breaks at work, waiting for the bus, while listening to lectures…
And that’s another lesson from Terada that illustrators should consider. Work with all of it. When inspiration strikes, he says he grabs from his stack of canvases and draws on them with markers. He loves the feel of a pencil on gessoed wood panel, and the unexpected lines that can come from the wood grain. He works with ballpoint pens in spiral-bound notebooks, although he admits that as he gets older, he finds it harder to see the fine lines they create.
Don’t limit your tools and don’t limit yourself. And maybe, one day, we can all become as prolific as Katsuya Terada.
