[1] His work ranges widely from highly detailed comics and novel illustrations to expressive, futuristic character designs for video games and anime.
[2] Growing up, these two artist were inspirational to Terada for combining clean line art styles from book illustration with the dynamic energy of manga.
Like many young Japanese boys, he grew up buying Weekly Shonen Jump and other comic book titles from his pocket money.
At age 21 he received a commission for work from animator Toshio Nishiuchi to produce character designs, background illustrations, instruction manual art, as well as a logo for Nintendo's home entertainment system, the NES/Famicom.
Terada's illustrations served to supplement player experiences of the NES games, due to the early system's limited capacity to show details on a screen.
In the case of Blood: The Last Vampire, the game's director, Hiroyuki Kitakubo, specifically reached out with the film script in hand to commission Terada to develop character sketches.
He made additional contributions to early issues of Nintendo Power, including a special edition strategy guide for Dragon Warrior and artwork for The Legend of Zelda.
He has admitted various influences on his work, particularly European ones, like Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) and the magazine Métal hurlant which he has said gave him a taste for strong, scantily-clad women.
[15] Terada was also invited to create variant cover for Geof Darrow's American comic series Shaolin Cowboy: Cruel to Be Kin issue 5, published by Dark Horse.
[16] In his review of The Monkey King, writer Ray Olson writes that Terada's artwork "explodes with energy, overflows with baroque lineation and voluptuous figuration, exploits color like a chameleon with multiple personality disorder.
[5] He describes his design process as pulling from his internal visual bank: "I have a habit of looking at objects and imagining how they would transfer from shapes to lines.
"[5] By drawing lines that he describes as not existing in the natural world, he builds original images, characters, and subjects one pen-stroke at a time.
[2] To promote its publishing, Terada attended San Diego Comic-Con in 2014 and did multiple book signings and live drawings.
[22] In 2014, Terada also published his artbook Erotic Engineering, exploring his personal brand of mixing pin-up style images of women with machinery, including small captions giving insight to the over-eighty illustrations.
It was a project supervised by writer, editor, and game designer Gabin Ito, and coincided with Terada's TEN - 10 Year Retrospective illustration book.
[2] Terada also has shown work on the West coast of the United States, and in particular, in Los Angeles every December with Giant Robot 2.
[6] At Gallery House Maya in Aoyama, Tokyo, Terada also held a 2020 exhibition of 19 new pencil illustrations titled The Monster and the Boy ( モンスターと少年 ).