In 2026, VALORANT overhauled Agent progression with Agent Mastery, a system that gives Agents across the roster new key art through poses, portrait upgrades, and customizable Agent IDs. Working under the project's Creative Lead, I directed the key art for 30 Agents: authoring each Agent's creative brief, then guiding vendor studios through ideation, refinement, and polish to final delivery.
Most of the direction came down to the pose. Whether an Agent reads clearly and feels like themselves at a glance is what separates real VALORANT key art from something that just looks close, so that's where most of my notes went.
The finished illustrations on this page were produced by Envar Studio, Mooncolony, and West Studio under my art direction.
Every Agent started with a brief. Before any art began, I wrote a creative document for each one, covering their personality and creative pillars, the kind of pose and silhouette we were after, rendering and color standards, and the composition limits the art had to work within.
From there the work moved through three stages: ideation, refinement, and polish. Ideation was wide exploration, lots of rough gestures testing how body language could capture what's true for that specific character. Refinement narrowed things down to the strongest silhouettes and tightened them up. Polish brought the chosen illustration to a finished, production-ready state.
At every stage I gave specific feedback, on gesture and silhouette, anatomy, value and color, expression, and how well each pose captured the Agent, until the piece could sit naturally next to the existing lineup.
Later in production, the project's Art Director and Creative Director joined. Part of my job became folding their direction into what we'd already built, and finding the compromises that let each piece land.
