Cyberpunk RED character art: a TTRPG-specific brief guide

Imogen mailed me a brief in early February that asked, in the subject line, for "a Cyberpunk RED solo, not the 2077 thing." I read those eight words twice before I opened the body of the email. They told me more than the four reference images attached did, because she had pre-empted the single biggest confusion I get on cyberpunk briefs: which cyberpunk are we painting.

This guide is for players running Cyberpunk RED at the table — the R. Talsorian tabletop set in the Time of the Red, 2045, four years after the Fourth Corporate War cratered the old Night City — and for the painter trying to give you a portrait that reads as that era and not as a still from a CD Projekt cutscene. The two settings share DNA. They do not share a wardrobe.

Table of contents

• RED is not 2077: the brief-killing confusion
• Pick a role first: ten archetypes, ten silhouettes
• Lifepath: the brief detail that does the most work
• Cyberware loadout: specify three, leave the rest open
• Gang and affiliation: the colour code
• RED-era fashion vs sleek-corpo 2077
• What to leave silent in the brief
• Starting your RED brief

RED is not 2077: the brief-killing confusion

Most of the cyberpunk briefs that land in my inbox use 2077 references, because that's what the search engine returns when you Google "cyberpunk character." This is fine if you're playing 2077 or running a generic-cyberpunk one-shot. It's actively wrong if you're running RED, because the two settings sit on opposite sides of a war.

RED's Night City has just been bombed. Arasaka tower came down in 2023 in this timeline. The Old Net is gone, replaced by a fragmented Cit-Net that netrunners reach through wired jacks and physical proximity. The corps that survived the Fourth Corporate War are licking wounds and running skeleton crews. The cars on the street are older. The buildings are patched concrete and salvaged steel. People wear what they can find, modify, and defend.

2077, by contrast, is twenty-eight years later. The corps have rebuilt. The Net is wireless again. Cyberware has gone sleek. Fashion has matured into a recognisable style system, with named designers and visible status hierarchies. A character from 2077 looks like a citizen of a working city. A character from RED looks like someone who survived something.

If you brief a RED character with 2077 reference, I will quietly ask the question in the kickoff call, because painting RED in a 2077 visual register makes the portrait read as a fan piece of the wrong game. The Cyberpunk RED at a glance roles and archetypes breakdown goes deeper on the era-specific visual language. If your brief is actually for the video game, the V Cyberpunk 2077 customizable protagonist portrait walkthrough is where to start.

Pick a role first

RED gives you ten roles to choose from, and each one has a silhouette before it has a face. The role tells me the gear, the posture, the wear pattern on the clothing, and roughly where the eye goes when the painting is done. I do not need stats. I need to know which of these ten the character is.

• Solo — the combat operator. Heavy chrome, layered tactical gear, weapons that are visible at portrait scale. Posture is settled, balanced, scanning. The shoulders carry the weight of armour even when there's no armour visible.
• Netrunner — the data thief. Less body, more rig. Cabled deck, neural ports at the temples or the back of the neck, eyes that are usually halfway elsewhere. RED-era netrunners are physically present in the room; the wireless 2077 version is not.
• Tech — the maker. Tools at the belt, scarred hands, sleeves rolled, often a magnifier loupe pushed up onto a forehead. Goggles around the neck. The least chromed of the high-tech roles.
• Medtech — the doctor. Gloves, a kit bag, a single clean piece of high-end gear amid the salvage. Eyes that are not afraid of bodies in distress.
• Media — the journalist. A camera or recorder, conspicuous press identification or conspicuously hidden press identification, depending on the politics. The character is usually mid-question rather than mid-action.
• Lawman — the cop. Body armour with NCPD lettering, sidearm at the hip, a helmet or cap that places them in the chain of command. Mood is tired or angry.
• Exec — the suit. Tailored clothing, the cleanest cyberware in the painting, often Kiroshi optics rather than chrome eyes. The corporate world's representative on the street.
• Fixer — the middleman. The most layered wardrobe in the game. Jewellery, custom tailoring, deliberate cyberware as fashion. Confident posture. Eye contact with the viewer.
• Nomad — the road family. Dust on everything, a kerchief or scarf, sun-bleached canvas, a vehicle implied by the wear pattern on the boots and the belt. Less chromed than a solo; more weathered.
• Rockerboy — the agitator. Stage-ready, even out of context. Hair and jacket carry the read. Often the most colour-saturated piece in a party portrait.

If you tell me the role in the first line of the brief, the rest of the brief becomes a refinement of that silhouette. If you don't tell me, I'll guess from your references, and I will guess wrong about a third of the time.

Lifepath

RED has a lifepath system that asks where your character grew up, what their family did, what happened that broke them. Most clients skim past these in the brief because they read like character-sheet flavour text. They are actually the single most useful piece of information you can send me.

A solo who grew up corporate and went rogue paints differently from a solo who grew up in a combat zone and never left. The first one has cleaner cyberware, slightly nicer clothes, and posture that doesn't yet know how to relax. The second one has scarring under the cyberware, mismatched gear that's been earned piece by piece, and a settled wariness in the eyes. Same role, different portrait.

The role tells me what your character does for a living. The lifepath tells me what they look like before they do it.

When Yusra briefed me a RED nomad last spring, she gave me three sentences of lifepath: her character had grown up in a Snake Nation convoy, had lost a sister to a corporate water-theft raid at fourteen, and now ran cargo solo between Night City and the dust. I painted those three sentences. The Snake Nation pattern on the headscarf, the sister's pendant tucked under the collar, the road wear on the jacket that said "I have been doing this alone for too long." The painting was a portrait of the lifepath, with the role gear hung on top of it. That's the right order.

Cyberware loadout

Here's the brief structure that works for me on cyberware: pick three specific pieces, name them by what they are or what they do, and let me handle the rest.

The three should include at least one piece that's visible at portrait scale. A neural jack at the back of the neck is great mechanically, but if your portrait is a chest-up three-quarter view, the viewer never sees it. Pick at least one piece that lives on the face, the hands, or the visible part of the torso.

What I want in the brief:

• The hero piece. The one cyberware element the character is identified by. A pair of chrome eyes, a sub-dermal weapon on the forearm, a full prosthetic hand. One piece, named specifically.
• The functional piece. Something that supports the role. A reflex booster for a solo, an interface plug for a netrunner, a medkit injector port for a medtech. This piece can be implied or visible.
• The personality piece. A cyberware choice that is not strictly necessary. Cosmetic skin chrome, a maker's mark engraved on the prosthesis, a custom paint job on a chrome arm. This is where the character's taste shows.

If you give me a list of twelve implants, I will pick three and ignore the rest, because portraits cannot show twelve implants without looking like an exploded diagram. The cybernetic limb and face design references sibling guide goes deeper on how I paint each kind of implant and what the "tasteful augmentation vs chrome-out" spectrum actually looks like at portrait scale.

Gang and affiliation

RED uses gangs as colour code. The Maelstrom are full-body chrome, red optics, industrial aesthetic. The Tygers are jade and gold, traditional tattoo motifs, Tiger Claw imagery. The Voodoo Boys are Haitian creole spiritualism layered over netrunner culture, distinctive dreadlock styles and African-diaspora motifs. The 6th Street are paramilitary, surplus US flag patches, veterans of bad wars. The Aldecaldos are nomad family, deep tan, road-weathered everything.

If your character is gang-affiliated, name the gang and I'll pull the colour code straight into the palette. If your character is ex-gang, the visual language is more interesting: you wear pieces of the old colours but not the full set, you have a tattoo you've stopped showing, the dreadlocks are growing out wrong. Ex-affiliation reads as "I left, but I didn't leave entirely," and that's a richer portrait than a current member usually is.

The faction also affects the cyberware. A Maelstrom solo has more visible chrome than any other faction's solo would. A Tyger Claw exec has more biosculpt and fewer mechanical visible parts. A Voodoo Boys netrunner has more spiritual iconography around the rig. Naming the affiliation saves me a round of reference-pulling.

RED-era fashion vs sleek-corpo 2077

This is where the painting wakes up or dies, so I want to be specific.

The RED era runs on what survived 2023. Clothing is patched. Boots are reglued. Jackets are inherited from older siblings, dead friends, or pulled off bodies. Colour is what you could find — surplus military green, faded denim, oil-darkened canvas. Pure white is rare. Pure black is rare. Most palettes sit in dusty earth tones with a single neon accent: a pink scarf, a cyan trim on the jacket cuff, a sodium-yellow bandana. The accent is a deliberate fashion choice in a world where most of the colour has been beaten out.

2077, by contrast, is wearing what the corps are selling again. Tailored jackets. Designer prosthetics. Eyewear that costs a month's salary. The palette is denser, the chrome is more deliberate, and the colours are confident — full neon-pink coats and electric cyan hair are normal. A 2077 character can wear a single-piece designer outfit and read as period-correct. A RED character in the same outfit looks like a cosplayer.

A few RED-era specifics:

• Layering is structural. Most RED characters wear three to five visible layers because every layer has a function — armour panel under a jacket under a coat, with a scarf that doubles as a face mask.
• Footwear is heavy. Boots are reinforced. Sneakers are rare. Sandals are nonexistent. The ground in Night City is not friendly to feet.
• Eyewear is functional first. Goggles, dust masks, breathing filters. The character has at least one piece of gear that protects them from particulate or chemical exposure, even if it's pushed up onto the forehead in the portrait.
• Visible weapons are normal. A holstered sidearm or a slung long gun is unremarkable in RED. In 2077 it's a status statement. In RED it's a tool.

If you're choosing between styles for the portrait, the choosing a commission style walkthrough is worth a read — painterly suits a weathered RED character the way semi-realistic suits a polished 2077 corpo.

What to leave silent in the brief

The RED brief that goes wrong most often is the one with too much information.

Don't tell me your humanity score. Don't list every cyberware mod from the rulebook. Don't send me your character sheet. The painting cannot show your reputation rolls or your IP. What I need from you is the visual brief — role, lifepath, three cyberware pieces, gang affiliation if any, hero piece, mood note. About a hundred and fifty words, plus references.

Do tell me:

• The one-line pitch. "She's a Solo who used to be Aldecaldos and now lives on a rooftop in Pacifica with a cat she didn't ask for." That one sentence will run the whole portrait.
• The age range. Cyberpunk is not entirely populated by twenty-five-year-olds. A fifty-year-old solo who's been alive too long is a different painting than a twenty-five-year-old solo who hasn't been alive long enough.
• The current emotional register. Tired? Hunting? Hiding? Just lost someone? The eyes carry that, and the eyes are the painting.

The how to write a commission brief guide goes deeper on this, but the short version is: be specific about what you want me to see, and be silent about what the painting can't show anyway.

Starting your RED brief

If you've got a RED character sitting in your campaign notes — or a one-shot solo you want immortalised before the table forgets her — the order form has a free-text field that handles the brief format I've described above. The portfolio has a few RED-era pieces filed under cyberpunk, if you want to see the visual register before you commit. The character work service page covers the styles, turnaround, and what's included in the kickoff call.

For more on the wider genre, the cyberpunk character art commission guide sits one level up from this piece. The neon palette painting sibling covers the three-colour discipline I use for cyberpunk work, and the street samurai vs netrunner vs corpo breakdown digs into the visual cues that separate the archetypes when you're briefing a party portrait. The netrunner portrait painting another world piece is a deep walk through one specific RED-era netrunner commission start to finish.

Write the one-line pitch first. Everything else slots in behind it.