Netrunner Portraits: painting someone who lives in another world

Tomasz sent me a brief in October that I still think about. He wanted a portrait of his Shadowrun netrunner, Sable-09, and the first line of the brief was: "Her body is in a chair in a basement in Berlin. She herself is not." I read it twice and knew the painting was going to be harder than the usual chrome-and-coat cyberpunk commission. The character he had written did not live where her body lived.

Painting a netrunner is the strangest job in the cyberpunk genre, because the person you are painting is mostly somewhere else. This is a working guide to what that means in practice: what the body looks like when the mind is gone, what the avatar looks like when the mind arrives, and how to brief a netrunner art commission so the portrait honors both. If you have a netrunner you want painted and the brief feels harder than your group's solo or street samurai, that is because it is.

Table of contents

• Why netrunners break the standard cyberpunk portrait
• The body in meatspace
• The avatar in the NET
• The two-portraits-in-one approach
• Cyberpunk RED vs Shadowrun: visual differences for netrunners
• Gear that signals "netrunner" without explanation
• Common mistakes I see in netrunner briefs
• How to brief a netrunner portrait
• Closing notes

Why netrunners break the standard cyberpunk portrait

Most cyberpunk character art commissions are built on the same scaffolding. Neon rim light, wet pavement, a coat, a weapon, a face that has seen things. That scaffolding works for a solo, a fixer, a street samurai, a corp exec on the take. It does not work for a netrunner, because the netrunner you actually play is rarely the body in the chair. The body is a delivery system. The character is what the body produces when it dives.

This is the thing clients often arrive without having articulated. They have written a sharp brief for a hacker in a hoodie, and they have not yet figured out that the hoodie is the least interesting part of the person. The interesting part is what that person becomes when the deck powers up. So the first conversation I have with anyone commissioning a netrunner is: which version of this character do you want on the canvas? The body? The avatar? Both? The answer changes everything that follows.

The body in meatspace

The body of a netrunner is a body that does not get used much. That is the first design decision, and it is one a lot of clients want to skip past because it feels unflattering. Most netrunners, in lore, dive for hours at a time, plugged into a deck through a neural interface, while their physical body sits or lies in a safe room somewhere. The hands move on a control surface. The eyes are closed or rolled back. The autonomic stuff keeps running. Everything else is on standby.

What that does to a body over years is the thing I want the painting to show. Lean to the point of frail. Slightly hunched from too many hours in the chair. Skin that has not seen sun in months. Cabling marks at the base of the skull, scarring around the interface jacks, sometimes a permanent shunt where the deck lives. Atrophy in the arms and shoulders, because all the muscles that matter for the work are the small ones in the fingers. The body is not athletic. It is a chair-shaped body.

Then there is the other direction, the hyper-modified netrunner, and this is where Shadowrun and Cyberpunk RED diverge sharply. Some netrunners go the opposite way. They replace the body they barely use with cyberware, partly because they can afford it, partly because if you are going to ignore your meatspace presence, you may as well make the meatspace presence terrifying. Mirrored eyes. Skin grafts that read as armor. Implanted ports that are not even pretending to be subtle. This version of the body says: the netrunner does not care what you think of the wrapper. They are not in it most of the time anyway.

Both reads are valid. I have painted both. The question I ask the client is which kind of netrunner this character is: the one who has let the body go, or the one who has fortified it as a kind of cage. Either choice carries weight in the brief.

The hands

One specific detail I obsess over: the hands. A netrunner's hands are the only part of the body that gets a real workout. In the painting, they should look like the hands of a pianist who only practices scales. Long fingers, sometimes with reinforced knuckle implants, often with subtle finger-tip modifications for tactile precision on the control surface. I paint the nails short, sometimes ragged. I leave the cuticles a little raw. Real hands, not glamour hands. The fingers should look like they have spent more time on a deck than on anything else.

The avatar in the NET

The avatar is the second portrait, and this is where the brief becomes a different document. The avatar is who the character actually is when they work. Inside the NET, there is no body weight, no atrophy, no cabling. The character can look like whatever they want, within the limits of their construct skill, their personal aesthetic, and the local data architecture. Some netrunners run a clean abstraction of their meatspace self, leaner, healthier, idealized. Others run something else entirely: an animal, an angel, a piece of geometry, a corporate logo defaced.

The avatar is the place a brief can go in a direction painted cyberpunk almost never does. I have painted netrunner avatars as: a translucent figure made of teal wireframe, a child wearing a wolf mask, a corporate suit with the face removed and a screen in its place, a woman in flowing red robes who is clearly not the lean pale frame in the chair. The avatar tells you what the netrunner thinks they look like, and that is one of the most revealing decisions a player can make about a character.

When I paint an avatar I lean into a different visual language entirely. The brushwork is cleaner, more graphic. The lighting becomes more theatrical, because the NET does not obey real-world physics. I let colors saturate further than I would in meatspace. I sometimes give the avatar a subtle off-register or chromatic aberration, like a slightly out-of-focus video signal, to remind the eye that this is a projection, not a person. The avatar should feel beautiful in a way the body cannot.

The two-portraits-in-one approach

This is the brief I love getting. Half the canvas is the body in the chair. The other half is the avatar in the NET. The two halves are connected by a single object: usually the deck, or the cable running from the back of the skull, or a halo of light that resolves into a wire on one side and a halo on the other.

The netrunner's whole tragedy and whole appeal is that there are two of them and only one ever feels alive. The portrait is the only place both versions can occupy the same frame.

I have done versions of this composition four different ways. The vertical split, with meatspace on the left and the avatar on the right, joined by a horizon line that becomes a data stream. The mirror, where the avatar floats directly above the slumped body in the chair, lit from a single source so the upper figure is bright and the lower figure is in shadow. The reflection, where the body looks down into the surface of a deck or a screen and the avatar looks back up at them. And my favorite, the door, where the body is in one room and the avatar is glimpsed through a doorway behind them, lit by the cold blue of a server stack.

This composition costs more time and more thought than a single portrait. It is also the portrait that lands hardest for the people who play netrunners seriously, because it shows what the standard cyberpunk character art commission cannot.

Cyberpunk RED vs Shadowrun: visual differences for netrunners

The two main TTRPGs that take netrunners seriously do not paint them the same way, and a brief that gets this wrong will look off even if every other element is correct.

In Cyberpunk RED, the netrunner has been forced back into meatspace by the DataKrash. The old global NET collapsed, and what is left is a series of local architectures. Netrunners in RED dive into a specific tower, a specific building, a specific network. They are physically near the system they are hacking. So the meatspace portrait often shows the netrunner in the field, in a hideout, in the back of a van. The deck is sleeker, more modern, much more portable. Interface jacks are subtle. The aesthetic leans toward Edgerunners-era streetwear, layered fabric, practical gear. The avatar runs in a constrained local space and tends to be more abstract, voxel-like, less ornate.

In Shadowrun, the Matrix is global and wireless. Netrunners, there called deckers or technomancers depending on edition, can dive from anywhere into anywhere. So the meatspace portrait tends toward the basement, the safe room, the chair. The body is more static, the gear more elaborate. Shadowrun also has the magic side of the setting bleeding into the tech side, which means a Shadowrun decker portrait can include things a RED netrunner never would: a familiar perched on the deck, a small sigil on the wrist, a coffee cup that is suspiciously full despite no one having moved in six hours. The avatar in Shadowrun is allowed to be wildly stylized. Technomancers especially run avatars that look like nothing else in the cyberpunk genre: sprites, summoned figures, things made of light.

If your brief is for Cyberpunk RED, the body wants to look mobile and the deck wants to look field-ready. If your brief is for Shadowrun, the body wants to look settled and the avatar wants to do most of the storytelling. Tell me which game in the first line of the brief and the entire visual treatment shifts.

Gear that signals "netrunner" without explanation

A good netrunner portrait reads as a netrunner before anyone reads the caption. Here is the gear that does the work, in rough order of how much it carries:

• The deck. This is the single most important object in the painting. Tabletop, lap-mounted, wrist-worn, whatever the edition allows. The deck should look used. Custom labels, scratches, modifications, a bit of tape on a corner. A pristine deck reads as marketing material; a beat-up deck reads as a working tool.
• Interface jacks. Usually at the base of the skull, sometimes at the temple, occasionally at the spine. I paint them as visible chrome ports with a slight rim of redness, the way a piercing looks two weeks after it heals. Subtlety matters. A face full of jacks reads as costume.
• The cable. If the character is plugged in during the portrait, the cable from the back of the skull to the deck is the central visual element. I paint it with weight, like a real cord, not a glowing ribbon. The cable says "this is happening right now."
• The neural rig or 'trodes. A net of fine wires that wraps around the skull, a halo of contacts, or a more ornate rig that frames the head like a crown. RED tends toward subtle 'trodes. Shadowrun allows more ornate rigs.
• Cooling. Long dives heat the gear. I sometimes paint a small cooling unit on the deck, a fan grille, a faint heat shimmer above the chassis. It is a small detail that tells the viewer the run has been going for hours.
• The work surface. Hands on a deck, or on a holographic projection, or on a folded keyboard. The hands are doing something. They are not posed.

Things I generally leave out unless the brief explicitly asks for them: glowing eye effects, visible code raining down the character, "the Matrix" green typography, lens flares from the deck. These are the AI-cliché defaults for cyberpunk hacker images and they make the work look like everyone else's.

Common mistakes I see in netrunner briefs

A few patterns I have learned to push back on, gently, before the painting starts:

• Briefing only the avatar, never the body. I get briefs that describe a beautiful, idealized character in a flowing coat with mirrored eyes and a sword. Then I ask where this character lives in meatspace and the client realizes they have not thought about it. The avatar is half the work. The body is the other half. Both need a sentence.
• Briefing the body as a solo. The opposite mistake. The brief describes a six-foot armored character with combat gear, who happens to hack. That is a solo with a side skill. A netrunner's body is not combat-shaped, because every hour of combat training is an hour not spent on the deck.
• No environment. Netrunners are tied to where they dive from. A brief that says "she stands in the rain on a rooftop" is a brief for a different character. Tell me where the chair is. Tell me what the safe room looks like.
• Generic chrome. "Lots of cyberware, mirrored eyes, neon" describes a Cyberpunk 2077 NPC, not your specific character. Pick one or two distinctive modifications and give them a story.
• No tone on the avatar. "Avatar looks cool" is not a brief. Is the avatar reverent? Mocking? A piece of joke geometry? An ex-self the netrunner has not been able to put down? The avatar carries the character's psychology.

How to brief a netrunner portrait

Here is the working checklist I use when intaking a netrunner commission. If your brief covers most of these, I will not need to send back a list of questions.

• System. Cyberpunk RED, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun (which edition), or something else. This sets the visual rules.
• One-line pitch. As with any character, the essential vibe. "A retired corporate decker now running freelance jobs for guilt money."
• Which version on the canvas. Body only, avatar only, both. If both, which composition: split, mirror, reflection, door, or your own idea.
• The body's condition. Atrophied, hyper-modified, somewhere in between. Age range and build.
• Distinctive cyberware. One or two modifications that matter to the character.
• The deck. Make, condition, custom features. A brand reference is fine if you have one.
• The avatar's aesthetic. What the character looks like in the NET. Lean into this. Be specific.
• Where the body lives. The safe room, the chair, the van, the abandoned office. Lighting cues for the meatspace half.
• Tone. Is this character winning or losing? Are they good at this, or are they hanging on?
• Reference images. Three to five for vibe, palette, and any specific gear references. The reference attachment field on the order form handles these.

If the brief gets all of these into one page, the painting is half-done before I open the file. The questions for the kickoff call become smaller and more specific, and the first sketch is closer to the final piece.

A short note on technomancers

If your Shadowrun character is specifically a technomancer rather than a decker, mention this in the first line of the brief. Technomancers do not use a deck. Their avatar is generated from inside their own neural tissue. The portrait treatment shifts substantially. The meatspace body becomes more important, because there is no equipment to anchor the eye on, and the avatar becomes more strange, less constructed, more dream-logic. I treat technomancer commissions almost like horror commissions in some ways. The character is a body that produces something that should not be possible.

Closing notes

A netrunner portrait is two paintings for the price of one and a half, and the briefs that work are the briefs that treat it that way. The body and the avatar each deserve a sentence and a reference. The system you are playing decides the visual language. The deck does most of the heavy lifting in meatspace. The avatar does the rest.

If you have a netrunner sitting in a brief draft and you are not sure whether to commission the body, the avatar, or both, the character art services page walks through how the two-portrait approach prices out, and the order form has space for both halves of the description. The portfolio has a handful of cyberpunk pieces that show the visual language we work in, including a few netrunner commissions where the avatar carries the painting.

You can also read the cyberpunk character art commission guide for the broader genre framing, or the field-specific notes in Cyberpunk RED character art tips and the street samurai vs netrunner archetypes breakdown for how netrunner briefs compare to their gun-shaped colleagues. If you are leaning into the visual palette specifically, the neon palette piece on pink, cyan, and sodium covers the color logic I default to. And if your netrunner has had a lot of cyberware done to the meatspace body, the cybernetic limb and face design references post is the closer read on how I paint that work.

Send the brief when it is ready. Tell me where the body is. Tell me who the avatar thinks they are. The rest is paint.