How does Katsuya Terada draw?

The analog kit is simple and portable: water-based markers, brush pens, paints and pencils, the tools of a man who draws on trains. His color work made the opposite bet early. Terada was among the first illustrators in Japan to adopt Corel Painter for finished color illustration, so early and so visibly that fellow artists, Akira Toriyama among them, came to watch him work in it; Japanese profiles credit that head start with helping lead the country's digital illustration scene, and he was a leading tablet artist when tablets were still exotic.

Today the sketchbook is digital too: in recent interviews he says he sketches nearly everything on a 13-inch iPad Pro, for speed and freedom. The constant across every tool is the no-net method, pulling pictures from what he calls his visual library: 'I have a habit of looking at objects and imagining how they would transfer from shapes to lines.' The library is stocked by the daily drawing, which is why the drawing cannot stop.

For a collector, medium is a dating tool on Terada pieces: marker and brush-pen originals belong to the live and sketch tradition, Painter-era color to his commercial peak, and the iPad years to the current sketchbooks. The two best printed records of the hand itself sit on this shelf: RakugaKing for the raw line, Real Size for the marker at full size.