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:
For a while now I've been debating whether I want to upload more of my Na'vi OCs to ArtFight. Up until now it's just been Neynari, Se'txelu, and Rolukx (and my sona but she doesn't count lol). I consider Neynari and Se'txelu to be the "main characters" of my little setting, so of course I'd want them up there, and Rolukx...well, he used to have a more prominent role than he does now; back when I first created him, he, Neynari, and Se'txelu were still the only characters in the "story" that had any solid development, but now that some of the other characters have caught up in that regard, he's taken a bit more of a back seat. BUT he was still the first "side character" to get a reference sheet so up he went anyways.
ANYWAYS. I've been debating whether I want to upload the rest of the characters, or whether I wanted to just leave it at the "main" characters (I even considered whether I wanted to take Rolukx's page down; he hasn't had many attacks anyways ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), and was frankly leaning towards not uploading because of how much work it'd take to make refs for them all.
.......buuuuut then ArtFight added the new Connections feature, and that made me really want to upload the rest of them so I can connect all their profiles all fun-like 🫠 soooooo let's make those refs!
a bit of lore rambling under the cut
Seylana and Vontxu were a childhood-friends-to-lovers type story I think. Vontxu is not an easy person to get to know, and he likely never would've never found a mate were it not for his very longstanding history with Seylana; they've known each other since they were very young and have always been close. Seylana probably knows how Vontxu ticks better than anyone else in the clan, and Vontxu feels more comfortable with Seylana than he ever has with any other peers. As they grew into teens and then adults, the transition from friendship to romance felt as natural as breathing.
They married fairly young (and absolutely no one in the clan was surprised by their union). Neynari is their only child - they love her dearly but felt that more children would be overwhelming.
After Seylana's death, Vontxu kept her green hair feather on his songcord. Neynari has the pink one on hers.
Oh and by the way, Seylana has three older sisters. At the moment I don't really know anything about her sisters, just that they exist and Seylana is the youngest. Feels right. Maybe I'll come back and flesh them out more someday or maybe their existence will remain just a fun fact about Seylana, we'll see.
Moving on: now, I don't have any set ages for any of the characters in this "story", because it doesn't really have a plot, it's more just "ok here's some characters and here's some slices of their lives", and those slices can come at any point during their lives, so setting an official age seems a bit pointless. However, while I might not have a general "this character is [x] years old", I do have a bit of "this character is [x] years older than that character".
That said, Lunaya and Tanu are a fair bit older than Seylana and Vontxu, I think. Neynari and Se'txelu are about the same age, give or take a year or two, but while Neynari was her parents' only child who they had fairly young, Se'txelu has an older brother by six years. Lunaya and Tanu didn't marry quite as young as Seylana and Vontxu did either. All in all I'd say Lunaya and Tanu are maybe 10-15 years older than Seylana and Vontxu.
I haven't worked out the details on Lunaya and Tanu's love story yet; I have some very vague ideas about it but they haven't really solidified enough to post anything coherent about. So stay tuned for some future post on that ig ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
...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
Had to stop and grab some screenshots of this lady because she reminded me so much of Neynari lol. Blond hair, blue eyes, from the Aranahe clan! Although she does still have the black tail tuft so I assume her hair is dyed (like Seylana's hrh), whereas Neynari's is naturally "blond" because of her leucism.
On which note, some might assume that, like her blond hair, Neynari's blue eyes are also caused by her leucism. Nope! Her eyes are unaffected; they would've been blue anyways even without the mutation! She inherited them from her father Vontxu, who has otherwise normal coloration...much like this fella who was hanging out with the lady above!
Who knows, perhaps these two are their distant relatives haha! Can't be direct descendants of either, since Neynari was Vontxu's only child and her descendants live with the Anurai now, but they could easily be the descendants of a cousin or something!
