Face stripes for my OCs, as well as a selection of canon characters.
Note regarding the canon character section: the patterns may not be 100% perfectly accurate to the ones on the photorealistic-style characters; I made this partly because comparing patterns is fun but also partly as a personal "quick ref" to use with my own art, so a lot of the patterns been adjusted for my style to some degree or other (in fact, I might make an even further simplified version of Tuk in particular - of all the members of the Sully family, she's the one I've drawn the least and the one I've had the most difficulty finding clear references for, so I haven't quite settled the essence of her pattern yet 😅).
Also have some family tree versions under the cut, because that is interesting to me:
Approximately two years before Neynari first came to the Anurai clan with an Aranahe trading party, a sickness swept through the Western Frontier region. Tragically, Seylana was one of the casualties. Neynari, who had always been very close to her mother, misses her dearly and frequently communes with her spirit at the Tree of Voices.
Language notes under the cut!
Some of you might find Zalu's initial question a bit odd, because after all, Neynari is still blue, just a much lighter blue than your standard forest Na'vi.
Well, the reason is that Na'vi groups colors differently than English does! KP's official chart from his Na'viteri post on the matter is this:
Though this one from Karyu Neytiri may also be useful:
A lot of learners ask how to say things like "light blue" or "dark red" etc. The thing is, the idea of a very "light blue" just doesn't really exist in the Na'vi language: once the shade gets pale enough, a color ceases to be considered "ean" (or tun/rim/'om) and instead becomes "neyn", no matter the hue.
So while an English speaker would look at Zalu and Neynari and say that they're both just two shades of the same color—blue—a Na'vi speaker would look at them and say they belong to two fundamentally separate color categories: Zalu is ean, Neynari is neyn. (on the flip side, an English speaker would say that Zalu's skin and eyes are two fundamentally separate colors: blue and green, while a Na'vi speaker would say they're just two shades of ean!)
...yes, the similarity of this word to Neynari's name is not coincidence. I first created this OC extremely early in my Na'vi language journey, and her original name was actually Neyntìsti ("lightcolor-anger")...I'd been aiming for "Light Fury" (yes, as in the dragon). Later, as I improved with the language, I realized how bizarre it would be for parents to name their kid something like "lightcolor-anger", so I decided to change her name...buuuuut went ahead and let myself keep the "neyn" part, since, yeah, the leucism thing is a rather notable aspect of her physical appearance 😅
As to whether Seylana and Vontxu purposefully chose this name because it had the word "neyn" in it, or whether that origin should be only a behind-the-scenes fun fact while in-universe the similarity is just a funny coincidence, I am undecided for now...
cough anyways.
One more quick language note: for Neynari's last line I'd originally written set po salew hu Eywa ("she proceeds with Eywa now"), which is the wording used in things like the "hunter's prayer". I ultimately decided to change salew to kelku si because it mirrored Zalu's question from earlier in the comic ("does she live with the Aranahe?" "no, she lives with Eywa").
...on which note, kelku si is not "live" as in be alive (that word would be rey), but rather "live" as in dwell — literally, "do-home".
...and yes, Neynari and Se'txelu's children have standard coloration. Because you see, both their mutations are recessive. Which means that in order for the trait to show up in the phenotype, you need to inherit a copy of it from BOTH parents. And Neynari and Se'txelu don't carry each other's mutations. soooo while their kids would be carriers for both conditions, it'd be impossible for any of them to actually show it themselves lol
I was reviewing my ArtFight roster recently and was bothered by the refs/thumbnails for some of the older characters, since all the art of them was....well, old. So I decided to do a big batch of one fresh fullbody for every character in my roster - plus that way they can all have nice matching thumbnails in a consistent style.
Wound up splitting the batch in half because fourteen is a lot of characters to draw in one go. So here's the first half......aka the half that didn't actually really need it lol 😅 But the next half coming soonish will be primarily old ARPG characters I haven't drawn in years who definitely need it so. yeah ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
