Katsuya Terada is probably best known in the United States as the character-designer for the animated film Blood: The Last Vampire. He has also done work related to American comics, such as Iron Man and Hellboy (one of his illustrations was used for an official statuette of Hellboy). In Japan, he is probably best known for the Tantei Jingūji Saburō mystery-adventure video game series.
Terada has defined himself as a "rakugaki" artist, more of a philosophy than a style of drawing, in which one draws a little everywhere, all the time, without thinking too much, on notebooks etc. He is a very prolific artist; one of his collections of sketches numbers more than 1000 pages, appropriately called Rakuga King.
He has done very little group-drawn work (an exception being the manga Saiyukiden Daienou (Monkey King)), his principal activities being illustration and character design.
His use of CG tools is integrated very well in his illustrations, giving his work a vivid and rich appearance. Most distinctive, though, are the female faces in his work, which could be described as “cute”, but with a dangerous or elusive character to the eyes. He has admitted various influences on his work, particularly European ones, like Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius) and the magazine Métal Hurlant which he has said gave him a taste for strong women who are slightly stripped.
