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V from Cyberpunk 2077: painting the customizable protagonist

Hector G. · Design Vortex founderMay 25, 202610 min read

Selene wrote to me in April with a brief that opened "I want a portrait of my V." Three lines later she added, "Not the one on the box. Mine." That distinction is the entire commission. A V portrait is fan art of your V, the character you built and played and grew attached to over a hundred and twenty hours, not the publisher's promotional render. The job is to paint the person you saw in your head every time the cutscenes ended.

This is a working piece on commissioning a fan-art portrait of V, the customizable protagonist of Cyberpunk 2077. Lifepath implications, the male V vs female V split, the Johnny Silverhand crossover, the Phantom Liberty era and Solomon Reed, and how the brief actually changes depending on whether you want your specific V or a more generic "Cyberpunk 2077 vibe" character. If V is sitting on your back burner, this is the read.

A quick housekeeping note on the legal side: V is intellectual property of CD Projekt Red, and what we paint here is personal fan art commentary — for your wall, your records, your love of a character. Fan art of recognizable IPs is for personal use only, not commercial resale. Frame this in your head the same way you would a portrait of a favorite musician: it lives in your home, not on a print-store shelf. The fan art IP gray area piece walks through this in more detail.

Why V is a different kind of fan-art commission
Male V vs female V: visual implications
The three lifepaths — Nomad, Streetkid, Corpo
Johnny Silverhand and the second-figure question
Phantom Liberty and the Solomon Reed brief
The "I want my V" vs "generic 2077 vibe" spectrum
What gets lost when the brief is too vague
Closing notes

Why V is a different kind of fan-art commission

Most fan-art commissions are of fixed characters. Geralt of Rivia looks like Geralt of Rivia. Malenia looks like Malenia. The character has a canonical appearance, the player has a strong mental image, and the brief is mostly about pose, mood, and style. V is the opposite. V is a customizable protagonist — the player built the face, picked the body, chose the voice, made decisions that branched the appearance further over the course of the game. There are as many Vs as there are players, and the canonical "default" V from the marketing is just one face among millions.

This means a V commission is closer to an original-character commission than to a typical fan-art piece. The reference material is your save file, your screenshots, your character creator settings. I cannot paint V from memory because the V in your memory is not the V in mine. Every client who books a V portrait has to bring me visual reference of the specific V they played, or the painting will be a fan-art guess rather than a portrait. This is the single biggest thing to get right at intake.

The good news is that Cyberpunk 2077 makes this easy. The game has a photo mode. Most V commissions arrive with a folder of in-game screenshots — close-up portraits, three-quarter shots from cutscenes, sometimes a still from the apartment mirror. Those screenshots are gold for the painter. A reference pack of eight to twelve V photos lets me get face structure, skin tone, eye color, hair, scars, cyberware placement, and signature outfit all from the source. Without that pack, the painting is a guess. With it, the painting is a portrait.

Male V vs female V: visual implications

The male and female V split in 2077 is not just cosmetic. The two body types animate differently, the voice acting reads differently, the cyberware sits differently on the frame, and the canonical outfits land at slightly different proportions. For a portrait commission, the split matters mostly in the way the character carries weight.

Female V, with the default Jennifer Hale-styled vocal performance, leans toward a leaner silhouette in most player builds. The standard outfits tend to read as more layered — jackets cropped at the waist, fitted tops, the iconic green-and-yellow Samurai bomber sits with the shoulder-line more visible. The face structures in the creator allow for sharper angles than the male presets. When I paint a female V, I tend to give the brushwork a bit more edge — slightly harder shadows, slightly higher contrast on the bone structure of the face, especially the jaw and cheekbones.

Male V, with the default Gavin Drea performance, has a heavier frame in most builds. Broader shoulders. The same Samurai jacket reads as bigger on the body, the gun reads as more proportionate to the hands, the cyberware sits differently on the scalp and neck. The face creator allows for a wider range of stubble, scarring, and beard work than the female presets, and most male V portraits I have done lean into one of those details — a deliberate scar, a specific beard shape, the way the hair has been buzzed at the sides.

Neither read is "better." But the brief should name which V you played, and ideally include reference of the specific build. "Female V, leaner build, undercut bob in dark red, the green-and-yellow Samurai jacket, the white tank underneath" is the kind of one-line description that lets me get straight to work.

The three lifepaths — Nomad, Streetkid, Corpo

Cyberpunk 2077's three lifepaths — Nomad, Streetkid, and Corpo — are not just narrative branches. They shape the V you arrived at Night City as, and they leave visible marks on the character if you paint that history into the portrait. Most clients who care deeply about their V want the lifepath in the painting somehow. Here is what each one tends to want visually.

Nomad V

The Aldecaldo. V grew up in the Badlands, in the Nomad family clans, and arrives in Night City as an outsider with a vehicle obsession and a road-shaped worldview. A Nomad V portrait tends to bring dust into the painting somehow — a faintly weathered jacket even when V has lived in the city for months, sun-tightened skin around the eyes, sometimes a small unit patch from the Aldecaldos on the upper arm or jacket pocket. The vehicle is often the second subject of the portrait. I have painted Nomad Vs leaning against the Thorton Mackinaw, sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, framed against the open Badlands horizon. The aesthetic is closer to No Country for Old Men than to Blade Runner, and a brief that wants this should say so.

Streetkid V

The Heywood native. V grew up in Night City itself, has connections to the local bars and gangs from before the game starts, and reads as fully native to the urban environment. A Streetkid V portrait wants the city in the frame. Neon, alleys, signage in Korean and Japanese and English overlapping, the warm sodium of street-level lighting. The clothes are streetwear specific to a particular Heywood look — heavy on jackets, layered hoodies, gang-adjacent colors if the player leaned that way. Streetkid Vs tend to carry themselves like people who know which alley to take, and the painting should reflect that — a slight ease in the body language, a fluency in the environment that the other two lifepaths have to earn.

Corpo V

The Arasaka ex-Counterintelligence specialist. V was a corporate operator before the prologue gets them ejected, and that history shows even after they have been in the gig economy for months. A Corpo V portrait wants traces of the old life — the dental work is too good, the haircut is just a bit too clean for a merc, there is a brand on a watch or a lighter that does not match the rest of the kit. The Corpo lifepath outfit, the dark suit jacket and slacks, is the easiest visual shorthand if V kept any of it. But the deeper read is the bearing. A Corpo V stands differently in a room than a Streetkid V does, and a good portrait can carry that without anything in the costume explicitly saying "former exec."

Johnny Silverhand and the second-figure question

This is the brief that comes up about half the time on V commissions. Johnny Silverhand — the digital ghost of Keanu Reeves's rockerboy living inside V's head for most of the game — is one of the most-painted secondary subjects in Cyberpunk 2077 fan art. Clients ask for him alongside V in a portrait often, and the question is how to compose the two figures so the painting still reads as V's portrait and not a buddy-piece poster.

A few options I have settled on for V-and-Johnny commissions:

The shoulder-ghost. Johnny stands behind V's right shoulder, partly transparent, partly fading into the background. He is the second figure but he is not the subject. This is the cleanest read and the one I default to.
The reflection. V is the only solid figure in the painting. Johnny appears in a mirror, a window, the polished surface of a deck, a sliver of glass. He is present, but only in the way a ghost is present — visible only through a surface.
The contested-frame. V and Johnny are both fully painted, both holding ground in the frame, both lit by different sources. This is the buddy-piece version and it is the right choice if the portrait is about the relationship rather than about V specifically.
The trace. No Johnny figure at all, but a single visual touch — the Samurai jacket, an aviator pair on the bridge of V's nose, the silver hand itself on V's hip. The character is present in the gear, not in the figure.

For Phantom Liberty endings where Johnny is no longer in V's head, some clients still want him in the portrait as a memory rather than a presence. The trace approach works best for that. I have painted Vs whose only Johnny element is the aviators tucked into the jacket collar, and the painting reads heavier than a side-by-side ever would.

The two-figure brief is the one where I push back hardest at intake, because most clients arrive wanting a buddy piece and discover during the call that they actually want V with a haunting, not V with company.

Phantom Liberty and the Solomon Reed brief

Phantom Liberty, the 2023 expansion, opened a new visual register for V portraits. The Dogtown setting brings in spy-thriller staging that the base game does not have. Trench coats. Government safe-houses. The black-tie infiltration sequences. And the addition of Solomon Reed, the ex-FIA agent voiced by Idris Elba, gave V another secondary figure to paint alongside.

A Phantom Liberty V brief tends toward a different visual world than a base-game V brief. The palette runs colder. Indigo over neon. Concrete and rain over wet pavement and signs. V's gear in this era often includes things the base game does not — a specific Dogtown jacket, a piece of gear from the spy-thriller arc, sometimes a more deliberate outfit choice that signals V is now playing a different kind of game.

For commissions in this register I lean the brushwork colder and tighter. Less neon, more cinematic editorial light. The references that work best are stills from the Phantom Liberty cutscenes — the Black Sapphire sequence in particular gives me lighting setups I can build a whole portrait around.

Solomon Reed as a secondary figure works similarly to Johnny — shoulder-ghost, reflection, contested-frame, or trace. But Reed has a different gravitational pull than Johnny does. Where Johnny is loud, Reed is quiet. The shoulder-ghost approach with Reed tends to land best because his presence in the painting wants to be a watchful one, not a confrontational one.

The "I want my V" vs "generic 2077 vibe" spectrum

This is the conversation I have with every V client at intake. Briefs fall somewhere on this spectrum:

Pure "my V." The client wants a portrait of the specific character they built and played. They bring a folder of in-game screenshots. They have strong feelings about the eye color, the scar placement, the exact shade of red the hair turns under a sodium streetlamp. The painting is custom from the ground up. This is the brief I find most rewarding to paint, because the source material is yours, not the publisher's, and the painting ends up feeling like a real portrait rather than a fan-art piece.

Mostly "my V" with some defaults. The client played a custom V but is open to me filling some gaps. Maybe they did not screenshot the outfit they want, so they are happy for me to put V in the canonical Samurai bomber. Maybe they have not decided on the lighting. This is a very common middle-ground brief and it works well — I get the face from reference and the rest I work out with the client during the kickoff call.

"Cyberpunk 2077 vibe" character. The client wants a portrait that evokes V without literally being their V. Sometimes this is because they did not screenshot enough, sometimes because they are commissioning the piece as a gift for someone whose V they cannot reference, sometimes because they want a piece that captures the game's mood rather than a specific character. This is a perfectly valid brief and I treat it as semi-fan-art — a character clearly in the V mold, with the canonical kit and the right lifepath read, but without the specific facial reference that a "my V" piece requires.

The brief should name which end of the spectrum it sits at. A "my V" brief without reference photos is the most common intake problem, because the painting cannot deliver what the brief wants. A "vibe" brief with too much reference photo is the other side — I end up painting someone else's V by mistake, and the client wonders why the painting does not feel like their character. Naming the spectrum at the start saves both of us a revision round.

What gets lost when the brief is too vague

A few patterns I have learned to push back on, kindly, at intake on V commissions:

"Like the box art." The box art is one V among many, in a specific pose, with specific lighting. Clients who say "like the box art" usually do not actually want that exact piece — they want their V with the production values of the box art, which is a different ask. I clarify which is which.
No reference of their V. The single most common brief problem. Without reference photos, I cannot paint your specific V; I can only paint a generic V in the same mold. Open the photo mode in the game and send screenshots.
All the cyberware. V can be heavily modified, lightly modified, or barely modified in any given playthrough. The painting needs to know which one. "Lots of cyberware" is not a brief; "Kiroshi optics, mantis blades, a single subdermal armor scar at the sternum" is.
No lifepath in the brief. This is fixable in conversation but it is faster if the brief says it. Each lifepath shifts the painting's tone and palette.
Phantom Liberty mood with base-game cyberware loadout. The two eras of the game have slightly different visual languages, and a brief that wants the Dogtown trench-coat mood with a base-game street-merc loadout ends up reading inconsistently. Pick one.

Closing notes

A V commission is, more than any other fan-art commission I take, a portrait of your character. The brief that works names the lifepath, the build, the era, the second-figure choice, and brings reference of the V you actually played. The painting that follows is closer to a custom character commission with a license attached than to a standard fan-art piece.

If you have a V you want painted, the order form is the right place to start, and the "reference attachments" field is where the screenshot folder goes. The character art services page walks through what each tier of the commission includes, and the custom projects page is the right page for any V portrait that includes a secondary figure or a complex Phantom Liberty staging. The portfolio has a small handful of recent V pieces among the cyberpunk work, and they will give you a sense of where my treatment of the character tends to land.

For surrounding reads — the cyberpunk character art commission guide is the wider genre overview, the Cyberpunk RED character art tips piece is the tabletop sister to this video-game-character one, and the netrunner portraits piece covers the role that V can also lean into. The neon palette piece on pink, cyan, and sodium and the cybernetic limb and face design references piece are the technical reads on color and cyberware.

If your V is a fan-art commission and you want to see how that lands relative to other fan-art commissions, the anime and Souls fan art commission guide is the sister piece for that whole class of work. The fair-use, personal-use framing applies the same way across all of them. And if you have not yet picked which style you want V painted in — painterly, anime, lineart, semi-realistic — the commission style chooser is the read before the brief.

Send the brief when it is ready. Tell me which V you played. Bring the screenshots. The painting begins there.