Check Out This Amazingly Detailed Navi, a Vampire from Slavic Folklore
It looks unsettling, but also kind of interesting?
Sasha Ristic Krieger, Principal Character Artist, added another piece to his Vampir (Origin Series), this time creating a Navi, which is a creature from Slavic Folklore.
"In Serbia, they are often called nekrštenci (Некрштенци), meaning the unbaptized ones. Their origin is tied to an old and tragic belief preserved across many Slavic and Serbian traditions that the spirits of stillborn or unbaptized children could return among the living in a corrupted form", explained the artist.
Krieger also added that, according to folklore, the creature is described as a childlike vampire with an amorphous body, with milk teeth, a disproportionally large head, and limbs that seem to belong to different stages of life.
In rural traditions, it's believed that the Navi steal or drain the milk of goats and cows at night. In other versions, it steals the milk from mothers, making them lose the ability to feed their babies. The artist explained that these creatures are invisible to most people, except for those who were born at the same time as a Navi.
"People believed that when a child suddenly begins to laugh, reach out, or play with someone who cannot be seen, it may be interacting with a Navi. In many traditions, this behavior was interpreted as the presence of the creature. It was said that Navi sometimes plays with the children who might have been their siblings, lingering around the family they were once meant to belong to", added the artist.
The creature was created using ZBrush, 3ds Max, and Marvelous Designer.
You can also check his Djordje Kadijević 3D creation.
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