WikiFur - User contributions [en]

Ainsley Evergarden

2022-08-18T17:51:01Z

Snowhawk: This was years out of date and while I have a few minutes, I am changing it. I am Bad(tm) at this wiki stuff and Old(tm), still and I do not understand how to change things. :V

{{wikify}}
{{copyedit}}
'''Ainsley Evergarden''', also/formerly known as '''Snowahwk Alyandra''','''D'Amantru''',<ref name="dama"/> or '''przhevalsky''' is a [[furry artist]] and [[writer]], and a moderator for [[Artists Beware]].<ref>[https://artistsbeware.info/staff/ Staff Directory] - Artists Beware. Retrieved April 30, 2019.</ref> Their [[character]] is an [[anthropomorphic]] [[unicorn]].

As of 2016, they came out as non-binary, and as of June 2021, they changed their online name/persona to Ainsley Evergarden.

They often begin their online bios that they are a "40-something artist and writer, living in NH with their partner, one Smol Human, one doggo, and one betta fish."

== Biography ==
Ainsley began drawing at an early age. They often drew in class at school, resulting in their sketchbook being confiscated once by an English teacher their sophomore year of high school. They drew their first anthropomorphic characters in the late 1990s. They also began writing "scripts" (actually [[fanfiction]]) sometime in 1992 in response to the movie ''[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103776/ Batman Returns]'' and "pretend play" with one of their friends. This eventually led to ''[[w:Power_Rangers|Power Rangers]]'' fanfiction writing, as they and their best childhood friend were obsessed with the show. Eventually, these writings also included themes from ''[[The Lion King]]'', ''[[TaleSpin]]'', and the ''[[Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(series)|Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' games.

After moving away from their childhood friend for high school, Ainsley gradually moved into fanfiction for ''[[Star Wars]]'', then tales of their adventures in the Macintosh game ''[[w:Escape_Velocity_%28video_game%29|Escape Velocity]]''. This last move led to them beginning to create their own fantasy world.

== Fandom involvement ==

Ainsley found the [[furry fandom]] in the late 1990s while role-playing on AOL during a vacation at their father's house. They were directed by a fellow role-player to the work of [[Megan Giles]] on [[Elfwood]], and that is when they learned that not only were there other artists out there with the same idea (of putting animal characteristics on [[human]] bodies, in a setting outside of [[cartoon]]s), but there were communities of such artists.

Throughout their early writing and art period, Ainsley always had a character to represent them. This character's name and appearance changed many times, always with some back story to explain the change.

After returning home, Ainsley learned how to use their mother's 3-pass scanner and adjust their scanned images in Photoshop 3.0 to make them suitable for posting online. Under their real name, they joined Elfwood in November of 1999 as her first art gallery, and, being a mostly [[equine]]-based artist, started making "tours" of the equine artists of the site. They had been maintaining a personal website, dubbed Nytehawk's Nest, first on the now-defunct hosting service Hot Yellow, then on FreeServers, under their 8m.com domain.

In 2000, after graduating from high school, they received their own computer, an iMac DV SE. This increased their productivity levels, as they no longer had to share a computer with other family members. They dabbled in digital art more, using tools like the polygonal lasso to select an area and color it in with the paint bucket, as their only tools were a mouse or trackball. They tested out various shading techniques at this time.

A little less than a year after joining Elfwood, they joined the Wyvern's Library to upload some of their original stand-alone stories, and also started their soon-to-be-novel, ''Past Secrets''. During this time they also settled on the name Snowhawk.

After having disagreements with Elfwood's administration, and worried that some of their work would be pulled by the Elfwood Review Board, they pre-emptively removed their work from Elfwood and Wyvern's Library in February 2001, and started the process of deleting their accounts.

For Christmas of 2001, Ainsley received a package from her then-boyfriend. It contained a RAM upgrade for her iMac, and their first graphics tablet, a [[w:Wacom_(company)|Wacom]] Graphire. Their days of digital art with a mouse or trackball were over, and they began to test out various methods of producing her art.

After Ainsley decided to leave Elfwood, a friend from the Escape Velocity IRC chat room graciously donated some server space, and they moved their 8m website over. They first changed the name to Snowhawk's Nest, then to Aven Studios ("Aven" combining their first and last name) and took on the task of rebuilding their website from the WYSIWYG version generated by 8m. In addition, they joined the comic hosting website KeenSpace for hosting of the [[webcomic]] version of their novel, and her close friend, Xellandria, helped them create the layout of the comic site. They used a place holder page on their main website while the rebuild was in the works. The boyfirend who had sent the RAM and Wacom tablet gifted them with domain names for both the website and the comic site on their birthday in 2002. The rebuild of the main site began in June 2002, and the "pink" version of the site went live in July 2002. In late 2002/early 2003, KeenSpace went down and never returned.

While dealing with their personal sites, Ainsley joined up with [[VCL]] in May 2001, followed by [[Side 7]] soon after, then [[YNA]] in November of 2001. They updated the sites often throughout 2001 and 2002, but left VCL in December 2002. They continued to maintain their YNA gallery until mid-2004. They decided to leave there, due to not feeling like they could contribute enough.

While maintaining three galleries, Ainsley first started coding gallery-like pages for their website, and got the first iteration of their forum active, as well as installing the Menalto Gallery software to make maintaining her personal gallery easier. Unfortunately, in December 2002, the server their website was on (Nybble) went down, having suffered a hardware failure. They continued their online presence through art galleries only until they were put in contact with [[Gushi]] by Side 7 owner, [[Bad Karma]]. They restored their website in September of 2003, minus the gallery and forum. The forum returned in January 2004, and the Gallery returned sometime after.

In early May 2004, Ainsley's productivity dropped off, as they began pet grooming school. They managed to continue work on their novel, and also updated her website to the "blue" color scheme. It would keep this until a CSS-based rebuild in 2016.

At this point, Ainsley was only maintaining their personal and Side 7 galleries.

In May 2005, Ainsley's computer suffered a critical hard drive failure, and all of their art and writing work from the previous years was lost. Most of their CD-R and Zip disc backups were found to be failed or corrupted. Most art and writing from this year that they still share was recovered from what had been uploaded to their website.

In late July 2005, Ainsley decided to expand their online presence and joined [[Fur Affinity]], shortly before the site's first set of server problems.

From this point, they began to expand their online presence further, joining several art sites, several of which are now defunct. In addition to the sites listed above, they are/have been a member of [[ArtSpots]], [[DeviantArt]], [[Inkbunny]], [[Furocity]], [[Furiffic]], [[Furry Art Pile]], [[SoFurry]], [[Storm-Artists.net]], and [[Weasyl]].

== Online aliases ==

Though she was known longest online as Snowhawk, leading to their friends simply calling them Sno, Ainsley has used many aliases over the years. Throughout their earliest years online, especially in the #ev [[IRC]], they changed names frequently, being known as '''Ruby''', '''Sophie''', and '''Nytehawk''', among others.

Starting in January 2007, they were invited on board the team at [[fchan]] by their then-boyfriend, Raven, to help with moderating the site and responding to user-generated reports. In the interest of not immediately associating their online and [[real life]] personas with a site that shares [[adult]] [[furry art]], as they were mostly a clean artist at the time, they adopted the name '''Samiya''', and made their character an anthropomorphic [[w:Saluki|saluki]], who later became a saluki/[[husky]] [[hybrid|mix]].

== Character/creator confusion ==

While Ainsley went by the name Snowhawk, they also have a character in the novel of the same name. The original Snowhawk was the character, having been created to solve a problem created in the origianl writing. After a period of time, Ainsley adopted the character of Snowhawk, replacing Nytehawk, as they had grown to associate more with the former while writing.

They tried to distinguish between the two Snowhawks by referring to the character by either her full name or "Snow." They preferred online friends and acquaintances to shorten their name to "Sno" if they wished to shorten their name. At one point, they distinguished between the two with character appearance but eventually just merged the two appearances.

Part of their name change was to put more distance between themselves and the character.

== Other online presences ==
=== Second Life ===

Ainsley used various accounts for [[Second Life]], with Samiya Rossini being their first main account (now a male alt modeled after a character in her novel). This account was used mostly while they were a fchan moderator, and they could often be found in #fchan with the name "SLSami" or "Sami-SL". The surname was picked as it just "sounded good" with the first name. After a break from Second Life, they returned as Samiya but decided to try to distance themselves from the furry community for a time after encountering some hostility.

The next account they used extensively was '''Misae Silverfall'''. Misae was the name of their [[World of Warcraft]] main at the time, and they picked Silverfall as an homage to their real-life self's streak of silver hair.

In January of 2010, they moved to Snowhawk Przhevalsky. As Second Life had not yet removed last names, they picked Przhevalsky as it is a type of wild horse, though a far cry build-wise from the usual Arabian breed they normally depict Snowhawk as. In June of 2021, they changed this account name to Ainsley Evergarden, though if you receive a notecard from them with their calling card, it will still show the previous name.

They still create in Second Life, maintaining an in-world store, though most of their current stock is their art and webcomic.

=== Social Media ===

The first "social media"-esque site Ainsley took to was [[LiveJournal]]. They had several accounts there, but most have been removed, having been imported to Dreamwidth. They created various communities for subjects ranging from [[fish]], [[dog]]s, and [[Dance Dance Revolution]], to an once semi-successful role-playing community based on their novel's world.

They have ventured onto [[W:plurk|Plurk]], [[W:Tumblr|Tumblr]], [[Twitter]], and [[Facebook]]. They also maintained a [[W:Blogger (service)|Blogger]] site which chronicled her time in Second Life/InWorldz, WoW, TERA, and occasionally their real life, though this has been abandoned. A full link list can be found on their website.

== References ==
<references>
<ref name="dama">[http://www.furaffinity.net/user/damantru Userpage of damantru account] (which says "Full Name: D'Amantru") at Fur Affinity. Retrieved 2017 October 13.</ref>
</references>

== External links ==
{{Contributor|Snowhawk}}
* [https://delphin.digital/ Delphin.Digital] Current Website
* [http://avenstudios.net/ Aven Studios] (defunct; [http://web.archive.org/web/20180517194814/http://avenstudios.net/ archive from 2018])
* [https://www.furaffinity.net/user/everainsley/ EverAinsley] on [[Fur Affinity]]
* [https://www.inkbunny.net/Ainsley Ainsley] on [[Inkbunny]]
* [https://www.weasyl.com/~ainsley ainsley] on [[Weasyl]]
* [https://www.deviantart.com/everainsley EverAinsley] on [[deviantART]]
* [https://everainsley.sofurry.com/ EverAinsley] on [[SoFurry]]
* [http://www.side7.com/u/snowhawk/gallery Ainsley] on [[Side 7]]
* [https://alyandra.dreamwidth.org/ Ainsley Evergarden] and [https://damantru.dreamwidth.org/ Damantru] on [[Wikipedia:Dreamwidth|Dreamwidth]]
* [https://snowhawk.livejournal.com/ Snowhawk Alyandra] on [[LiveJournal]]

[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Artists]]
[[Category:Writers]]
[[Category:Unicorn characters]]

Ainsley Evergarden

2015-06-24T12:11:55Z

Snowhawk: /* Early history */ Error correction.

'''Snowhawk Alyandra''' (real name: '''Ashley Venable''', born February 5, 1981) is a [[furry artist]] and [[writer]]. Her [[character]] is an [[anthropomorphic]] [[unicorn]].

== Early history ==
Snowhawk began drawing at an early age. She was often drawing in class at school, resulting at one point in having her sketchbook being taken away by her English teacher in her sophomore year in high school. She drew her first anthropomorphic characters in the late '90s. She also began writing "scripts" (actually [[fanfiction]]) sometime in 1992 in response to the movie ''[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103776/ Batman Returns]'' and "pretend play" with one of her friends. This eventually led to ''[[w:Power_Rangers|Power Rangers]]'' fanfiction writing, as she and her best childhood friend were somewhat obsessed with the show. Eventually, these writings also included themes from ''[[The Lion King]]'' and the ''[[Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(series)|Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' games.

After moving away from her childhood friend for high school, Snowhawk gradually moved into fanfiction for ''[[Star Wars]]'', then tales of her adventures in the Macintosh game ''[[w:Escape_Velocity_%28video_game%29|Escape Velocity]]''. This last move led to her beginning to create her own fantasy world.

== Online presence ==
Snowhawk found the [[furry fandom]] in the late '90s while role-playing on AOL during vacation at her father's house. She was directed by a fellow role-player to the work of [[Megan Giles]] work on [[Elfwood]], and that is when she learned that not only were there other artists out there with the same idea (of putting animal characteristics on [[human]] bodies, in a setting outside of [[cartoon]]s), but there were communities of such artists.

Throughout her early writing and art period, Snowhawk always had a character to represent her. This character's name and appearance changed many times, always with some back story to explain the change.

After returning home, Snowhawk learned how to use her mother's 3-pass scanner and adjust her scanned images in Photoshop 3.0 to make them suitable for posting online. Under her real name, she joined Elfwood in November of 1999 as her first art gallery, and, being a mostly [[equine]]-based artist, started making "tours" of the anthropomorphic equine artists of the site. She had been maintaining a personal website, dubbed Nytehawk's Nest, first on the now-defunct hosting service Hot Yellow, then on FreeServers, under their 8m.com domain.

In 2000, after graduating from high school, she received her own computer, which allowed her productivity levels to increase. She dabbled in digital art more, using tools like the polygonal lasso to select an area and color it in with the paint bucket. She tested out various shading techniques at this time.

Little less than a year after joining Elfwood, she joined the Wyvern Library to upload some of her original stand-alone stories, and also started her soon-to-be-novel, ''Past Secrets''. During this time she also settled on the name Snowhawk.

After having disagreements with Elfwood's decision to make their restrictive rule set even more restrictive, and worried over some of her work (which did not fit into either the Lothlorien or Zone 47) being pulled by the Elfwood Review Board, she pre-emptively pulled her work from Elfwood and Wyvern Library in February 2001, and started the process to delete her account.

For Christmas of 2001, Snowhawk received a package from her then-boyfriend. It contained an upgrade for her computer, and her first graphics tablet, a [[w:Wacom_(company)|Wacom]] Graphire. Her days of digital art with a mouse or trackball were over, and she began to test out various methods of producing her art.

After Snowhawk decided to leave Elfwood, a friend from the Escape Velocity IRC chat room graciously donated some server space, and she moved her 8m website over. She first changed the name to Snowhawk's Nest, then to Aven Studios (combining her first and last name) and took on the task of rebuilding her website from the WYSIWYG version generated by 8m. In addition, she joined the comic hosting website KeenSpace for hosting of the [[webcomic]] version of her novel, and her close friend, Xella, helped her create the layout of the comic site. She used a place holder page on her main website while the rebuild was in the works. Erik gifted her with domain names for both the website and the comic site on her birthday in 2002. The rebuild of the main site began in June, 2002, and the pink version of the site went live in July 2002. In late 2002/early 2003, KeenSpace went down and never returned.

Whilst dealing with her personal sites, Snowhawk joined up with [[VCL]] in May, 2001, followed by Side 7 soon after, then [[YNA]] in November of 2001. She updated them often throughout 2001 and 2002, but left VCL in December 2002. She continued to maintain her YNA gallery until mid-2004. She decided to leave there, due to not feeling like she could contribute enough.

While working on maintaining three galleries, Snowhawk first started coding gallery-like pages for her website, and got the first iteration of her forum active, as well as installing the Gallery software to make maintaining her personal gallery easier. Unfortunately, in December 2002, the server her website was on (Nybble) went down, having suffered a hardware failure. She continued her online presence through art galleries only until she was put in contact with [[Gushi]] by Side 7 owner, [[Bad Karma]]. She restored her website in September of 2003, minus the gallery and forum. The forum returned in January 2004.

In early May, 2004, Snowhawk's productivity dropped off, as she started pet grooming school. She managed to continue work on the novel version of ''Past Secrets'' and also updated her website to its current blue color scheme at that time.

At this point, Snowhawk was only maintaining her personal gallery and her Side 7 gallery.

In May 2005, Snowhawk's computer suffered a critical failure, and all of her art and writing work from the previous years was lost. Most of her backup CD-Rs failed to work, though she managed to recover a few files.

In late July, 2005, Snowhawk decided to expand her online presence and joined [[Fur Affinity]], shortly before the site's first set of server problems.

From this point, she began to expand her online presence further, joining several art sites, some of which are now defunct. In addition to the sites listed above, she is/has been a member of [[ArtSpots]], [[deviantArt]], [[Inkbunny]], [[Furocity]], [[Furiffic]], [[Furry Art Pile]], [[SoFurry]], [[Storm-Artists.net]], and [[Weasyl]].

== Online aliases ==
Though she has been known longest online as Snowhawk, leading to her friends simply calling her Sno, she has had many aliases over the years. Throughout her earliest years online, especially in the #ev [[IRC]], she changed names frequently, being known as Ruby, Sophie, Gypsy, and Nytehawk, among others.

Starting in January, 2007, she was invited on board the team at [[fchan]] by her then-boyfriend, Raven, to help with moderating the site and responding to user generated reports. In the interest of not immediately associating her online and [[real life]] personas with a site that shares [[adult]] [[furry art]], she adopted the name Samiya, and made her character to at first be an anthropomorphic [[w:Saluki|saluki]], who later became a saluki/[[husky]] [[hybrid|mix]].

== Character/creator confusion ==
While Ashley goes by the name Snowhawk, she also has a character in her novel's world of the same name. The original Snowhawk was the character, having been created to solve a problem in the original writing of the novel. After a period of time, Ashley adopted the character of Snowhawk, replacing Nytehawk, as she had grown to associate more with the former while writing.

She tries to distinguish between the two Snowhawks by only referring to the character by either her full name or "Snow" only. She prefers folks online to shorten her name to "Sno" if they wish to shorten her name. At one point, she distinguished between the two with character appearance, but has since adopted the character's final novel coloration.

== Other online presences ==
=== [[Second Life]] ===
Snowhawk has used various accounts for Second Life, with Samiya Rossini being her first main account (now a male alt modeled after a character in her novel). This account was used mostly while she was an fchan moderator, and she could often be found in #fchan with the name "SLSami" or "Sami-SL". The surname was picked as it just "sounded good" with the first name. After a break from Second Life, she returned as Samiya, but decided to try to distance herself from the furry community for a time after encountering some hostility.

The next account she used extensively was Misae Silverfall. Misae was the name of her [[World of Warcraft]] main at the time, and she picked Silverfall as homage to her real-life self's streak of silver hair. As of June, 2015, her current account is Snowhawk Przhevalsky. As Second Life had not yet removed last names, she picked Przhevalsky as it is a type of wild horse, though a far cry build-wise from the usual Arabian breed she normally depicts Snowhawk as.

She enjoys creating in Second Life, owning a small shop in world, and has taken steps to learn how to create better items.

=== MMOs ===
Snowhawk is active in a small few MMOs at any given time. Her first was World of Warcraft, though she has not kept her account consistently active as she has in the past. She has been a beta tester and has a Founder account in [[The Exiled Realm of Arborea]]. She is also active in [[Elder_Scrolls#The_Elder_Scrolls_Online|Elder Scrolls Online]]. Previously, she has been a tester for and played [[w:The_Secret_World|The Secret World]]. She has also played [[w:Final_Fantasy_XI|Final Fantasy XI]] and [[w:Final_Fantasy_XIV|Final Fantasy XIV]].

=== Social Media ===
The first "social media"-esque site Snowhawk took to was [[LiveJournal]]. She has several accounts there, having hopped around various accounts, but has landed back on her original journal. She created various communities for subjects ranging from [[fish]], [[dog]]s, and [[Dance Dance Revolution]], to a once semi-successful role-playing community based on her novel's world.

She has ventured onto [www.plurk.com/ Plurk], [https://www.tumblr.com/ Tumblr], [[Twitter]], and [[Facebook]]. She also maintains a [https://www.blogger.com/ Blogger] site which chronicles her time in Second Life/InWorldz, WoW, TERA, and occasionally her real life.

== External links ==
{{Contributor|Snowhawk}}
* [http://avenstudios.net/ Aven Studios]
* [http://snowhawk.livejournal.com/ Snowhawk Alyandra] on [[LiveJournal]]
* [http://www.side7.com/gallery.cgim?member=snowhawk Snowhawk Alyandra] on [[Side 7]]
* [http://www.furaffinity.net/user/snowhawk/ Snowhawk Alyandra] on [[Fur Affinity]]
* [http://damantru.blogspot.com/ Snowhawk Alyandra] on blogspot.com

[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Artists]]
[[Category:Writers]]
[[Category:Unicorn characters]]
[[Category:1981 births]]

Ainsley Evergarden

2015-06-24T12:10:39Z

Snowhawk: /* Online presence */ Error correction.

'''Snowhawk Alyandra''' (real name: '''Ashley Venable''', born February 5, 1981) is a [[furry artist]] and [[writer]]. Her [[character]] is an [[anthropomorphic]] [[unicorn]].

== Early history ==
Snowhawk began drawing at an early age. She was often drawing in class at school, resulting at one point in having her sketchbook being taken away by her English teacher in her sophomore year in high school. She drew her first anthropomorphic characters in the late '90s. She also began writing "scripts" (actually [[fanfiction]]) sometime in 1992 in response to the movie ''[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103776/ Batman Returns]'' and "pretend play" with one of her friends. This eventually led to ''[w:Power_Rangers|Power Rangers]]'' fanfiction writing, as she and her best childhood friend were somewhat obsessed with the show. Eventually, these writings also included themes from ''[[The Lion King]]'' and the ''[[Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(series)|Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' games.

After moving away from her childhood friend for high school, Snowhawk gradually moved into fanfiction for ''[[Star Wars]]'', then tales of her adventures in the Macintosh game ''[[w:Escape_Velocity_%28video_game%29|Escape Velocity]]''. This last move led to her beginning to create her own fantasy world.

== Online presence ==
Snowhawk found the [[furry fandom]] in the late '90s while role-playing on AOL during vacation at her father's house. She was directed by a fellow role-player to the work of [[Megan Giles]] work on [[Elfwood]], and that is when she learned that not only were there other artists out there with the same idea (of putting animal characteristics on [[human]] bodies, in a setting outside of [[cartoon]]s), but there were communities of such artists.

Throughout her early writing and art period, Snowhawk always had a character to represent her. This character's name and appearance changed many times, always with some back story to explain the change.

After returning home, Snowhawk learned how to use her mother's 3-pass scanner and adjust her scanned images in Photoshop 3.0 to make them suitable for posting online. Under her real name, she joined Elfwood in November of 1999 as her first art gallery, and, being a mostly [[equine]]-based artist, started making "tours" of the anthropomorphic equine artists of the site. She had been maintaining a personal website, dubbed Nytehawk's Nest, first on the now-defunct hosting service Hot Yellow, then on FreeServers, under their 8m.com domain.

In 2000, after graduating from high school, she received her own computer, which allowed her productivity levels to increase. She dabbled in digital art more, using tools like the polygonal lasso to select an area and color it in with the paint bucket. She tested out various shading techniques at this time.

Little less than a year after joining Elfwood, she joined the Wyvern Library to upload some of her original stand-alone stories, and also started her soon-to-be-novel, ''Past Secrets''. During this time she also settled on the name Snowhawk.

After having disagreements with Elfwood's decision to make their restrictive rule set even more restrictive, and worried over some of her work (which did not fit into either the Lothlorien or Zone 47) being pulled by the Elfwood Review Board, she pre-emptively pulled her work from Elfwood and Wyvern Library in February 2001, and started the process to delete her account.

For Christmas of 2001, Snowhawk received a package from her then-boyfriend. It contained an upgrade for her computer, and her first graphics tablet, a [[w:Wacom_(company)|Wacom]] Graphire. Her days of digital art with a mouse or trackball were over, and she began to test out various methods of producing her art.

After Snowhawk decided to leave Elfwood, a friend from the Escape Velocity IRC chat room graciously donated some server space, and she moved her 8m website over. She first changed the name to Snowhawk's Nest, then to Aven Studios (combining her first and last name) and took on the task of rebuilding her website from the WYSIWYG version generated by 8m. In addition, she joined the comic hosting website KeenSpace for hosting of the [[webcomic]] version of her novel, and her close friend, Xella, helped her create the layout of the comic site. She used a place holder page on her main website while the rebuild was in the works. Erik gifted her with domain names for both the website and the comic site on her birthday in 2002. The rebuild of the main site began in June, 2002, and the pink version of the site went live in July 2002. In late 2002/early 2003, KeenSpace went down and never returned.

Whilst dealing with her personal sites, Snowhawk joined up with [[VCL]] in May, 2001, followed by Side 7 soon after, then [[YNA]] in November of 2001. She updated them often throughout 2001 and 2002, but left VCL in December 2002. She continued to maintain her YNA gallery until mid-2004. She decided to leave there, due to not feeling like she could contribute enough.

While working on maintaining three galleries, Snowhawk first started coding gallery-like pages for her website, and got the first iteration of her forum active, as well as installing the Gallery software to make maintaining her personal gallery easier. Unfortunately, in December 2002, the server her website was on (Nybble) went down, having suffered a hardware failure. She continued her online presence through art galleries only until she was put in contact with [[Gushi]] by Side 7 owner, [[Bad Karma]]. She restored her website in September of 2003, minus the gallery and forum. The forum returned in January 2004.

In early May, 2004, Snowhawk's productivity dropped off, as she started pet grooming school. She managed to continue work on the novel version of ''Past Secrets'' and also updated her website to its current blue color scheme at that time.

At this point, Snowhawk was only maintaining her personal gallery and her Side 7 gallery.

In May 2005, Snowhawk's computer suffered a critical failure, and all of her art and writing work from the previous years was lost. Most of her backup CD-Rs failed to work, though she managed to recover a few files.

In late July, 2005, Snowhawk decided to expand her online presence and joined [[Fur Affinity]], shortly before the site's first set of server problems.

From this point, she began to expand her online presence further, joining several art sites, some of which are now defunct. In addition to the sites listed above, she is/has been a member of [[ArtSpots]], [[deviantArt]], [[Inkbunny]], [[Furocity]], [[Furiffic]], [[Furry Art Pile]], [[SoFurry]], [[Storm-Artists.net]], and [[Weasyl]].

== Online aliases ==
Though she has been known longest online as Snowhawk, leading to her friends simply calling her Sno, she has had many aliases over the years. Throughout her earliest years online, especially in the #ev [[IRC]], she changed names frequently, being known as Ruby, Sophie, Gypsy, and Nytehawk, among others.

Starting in January, 2007, she was invited on board the team at [[fchan]] by her then-boyfriend, Raven, to help with moderating the site and responding to user generated reports. In the interest of not immediately associating her online and [[real life]] personas with a site that shares [[adult]] [[furry art]], she adopted the name Samiya, and made her character to at first be an anthropomorphic [[w:Saluki|saluki]], who later became a saluki/[[husky]] [[hybrid|mix]].

== Character/creator confusion ==
While Ashley goes by the name Snowhawk, she also has a character in her novel's world of the same name. The original Snowhawk was the character, having been created to solve a problem in the original writing of the novel. After a period of time, Ashley adopted the character of Snowhawk, replacing Nytehawk, as she had grown to associate more with the former while writing.

She tries to distinguish between the two Snowhawks by only referring to the character by either her full name or "Snow" only. She prefers folks online to shorten her name to "Sno" if they wish to shorten her name. At one point, she distinguished between the two with character appearance, but has since adopted the character's final novel coloration.

== Other online presences ==
=== [[Second Life]] ===
Snowhawk has used various accounts for Second Life, with Samiya Rossini being her first main account (now a male alt modeled after a character in her novel). This account was used mostly while she was an fchan moderator, and she could often be found in #fchan with the name "SLSami" or "Sami-SL". The surname was picked as it just "sounded good" with the first name. After a break from Second Life, she returned as Samiya, but decided to try to distance herself from the furry community for a time after encountering some hostility.

The next account she used extensively was Misae Silverfall. Misae was the name of her [[World of Warcraft]] main at the time, and she picked Silverfall as homage to her real-life self's streak of silver hair. As of June, 2015, her current account is Snowhawk Przhevalsky. As Second Life had not yet removed last names, she picked Przhevalsky as it is a type of wild horse, though a far cry build-wise from the usual Arabian breed she normally depicts Snowhawk as.

She enjoys creating in Second Life, owning a small shop in world, and has taken steps to learn how to create better items.

=== MMOs ===
Snowhawk is active in a small few MMOs at any given time. Her first was World of Warcraft, though she has not kept her account consistently active as she has in the past. She has been a beta tester and has a Founder account in [[The Exiled Realm of Arborea]]. She is also active in [[Elder_Scrolls#The_Elder_Scrolls_Online|Elder Scrolls Online]]. Previously, she has been a tester for and played [[w:The_Secret_World|The Secret World]]. She has also played [[w:Final_Fantasy_XI|Final Fantasy XI]] and [[w:Final_Fantasy_XIV|Final Fantasy XIV]].

=== Social Media ===
The first "social media"-esque site Snowhawk took to was [[LiveJournal]]. She has several accounts there, having hopped around various accounts, but has landed back on her original journal. She created various communities for subjects ranging from [[fish]], [[dog]]s, and [[Dance Dance Revolution]], to a once semi-successful role-playing community based on her novel's world.

She has ventured onto [www.plurk.com/ Plurk], [https://www.tumblr.com/ Tumblr], [[Twitter]], and [[Facebook]]. She also maintains a [https://www.blogger.com/ Blogger] site which chronicles her time in Second Life/InWorldz, WoW, TERA, and occasionally her real life.

== External links ==
{{Contributor|Snowhawk}}
* [http://avenstudios.net/ Aven Studios]
* [http://snowhawk.livejournal.com/ Snowhawk Alyandra] on [[LiveJournal]]
* [http://www.side7.com/gallery.cgim?member=snowhawk Snowhawk Alyandra] on [[Side 7]]
* [http://www.furaffinity.net/user/snowhawk/ Snowhawk Alyandra] on [[Fur Affinity]]
* [http://damantru.blogspot.com/ Snowhawk Alyandra] on blogspot.com

[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Artists]]
[[Category:Writers]]
[[Category:Unicorn characters]]
[[Category:1981 births]]

Ainsley Evergarden

2015-06-24T11:03:28Z

Snowhawk: Original creation..

Snowhawk Alyandra (real name: Ashley Venable, born February 5, 1981) is a furry artist and writer. Her character is an anthropomorphic [[unicorn]].

== Early History ==
Snowhawk began drawing at an early age, by her own admission. She was often drawing in class at school, resulting at one point having her sketchbook being taken away by her English teacher her sophomore year in high school. She drew her first anthropomorphic characters in the late 90s. She also began writing "scripts" (actually [[fanfiction]]) sometime in 1992 in response to the movie ''[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103776/ Batman Returns]'' and "pretend play" with one of her friends. This eventually led to ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Rangers Power Rangers]'' fanfiction writing, as her and her best childhood friend were somewhat obsessed with the show. Eventually, these writings also included themes from ''[[The Lion King]]'' and the ''[[Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(series)|Sonic the Hedgehog]]'' games. After moving away from her childhood friend for high school, she gradually moved into fanfiction for ''[[Star Wars]]'' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars], then tales of her adventures in the Macintosh game ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Velocity_%28video_game%29 Escape Velocity]''. This last move led to her beginning to create her own fantasy world.

== Online Presence ==
Snowhawk found the fandom in the late 90s while role-playing on AOL during vacation at her father's house. She was directed by a fellow role-player to the work of Megan Giles work on [[Elfwood]] and that is when she learned that there were not only other artists out there with the same idea to put animal characteristics on human bodies, in a setting outside of cartoons, but there were communities of artists.

Throughout her early writing and art period, she always had a character to represent her. This character's name and appearance changed many times, always with some back story to explain the change.

After returning home, Snowhawk learned how to use her mother's 3-pass scanner and adjust her scanned images in Photoshop 3.0 and make them suitable for posting online. Under her real name, she joined Elfwood in November of 1999 as her first art gallery, and being a mostly equine-based artist, started making "tours" of the anthropomorphic equine artists of the site. She had been maintaining a personal website, dubbed Nytehawk's Nest, first on the now-defunct hosting service Hot Yellow, then on FreeServers, under their 8m.com domain.

In 2000, after graduating from high school, she received her own computer, which allowed her productivity levels to increase. She dabbled in digital art more, using tools like the polygonal lasso to select an area and color it in with the paint bucket. She tested out various shading techniques at this time.

Little less than a year after joining Elfwood, she joined the Wyvern Library to upload some of her original stand alone stories, and also started her soon-to-be-novel, ''Past Secrets''. During this time she also settled on the name Snowhawk.

After having disagreements with Elfwood's decision to make their restrictive rule set even more restrictive, and worried over some of her work which didn't fit into either the Lothlorien or Zone 47 being pulled by the Elfwood Review Board, she pre-emptively pulled her work from Elfwood and Wyvern Library in February 2001 and started the process to delete her account.

For Christmas of 2001, she received a package from her then-boyfriend. It contained an upgrade for her computer, and her first graphics tablet, a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacom_(company) Wacom] Graphire. Her days of digital art with a mouse or trackball were over, and she began to test out various methods of producing her art.

After deciding to leave Elfwood, a friend from the Escape Velocity IRC chat room graciously donated some server space, and Snowhawk moved her 8m website over. She first changed the name to Snowhawk's Nest, then to Aven Studios (combining her first and last name) and took on the task of rebuilding her website from the WYSIWYG version generated by 8m. In addition, she joined the comic hosting website KeenSpace for hosting of the webcomic version of her novel, and her close friend, Xella, helped her create the layout of the comic site. She used a place holder page on her main website while the rebuild was in the works. Erik gifted her with domain names for both the website and the comic site on her birthday in 2002. The rebuild of the main site began in June of 2002, and the pink version of the site went live in July of 2002. In late 2002/early 2003, KeenSpace went down and never returned.

In the mean time of dealing with her personal sites, she joined up with VCL in May of 2001, followed by [[Side 7]] soon after, then [[VCL]] in November of 2001. She updated them often throughout 2001 and 2002, but left VCL in December of 2002. She continued to maintain her [[YNA]] gallery until mid-2004. She decided to leave there, due to not feeling like she could contribute enough.

While working on maintaining three galleries, she first started coding gallery like pages for her website, and got the first iteration of her forum active, as well as installing the Gallery software to make maintaining her personal gallery easier. Unfortunately, in December 2002, the server her website was on, Nybble, went down, having suffered a hardware failure. She continued her online presence through art galleries only until she was put in contact with [[Gushi]] by Side 7 owner, [[Bad Karma]]. She restored her website in September of 2003, minus the gallery and forum. The forum returned in January of 2004.

In early May of 2004, Snowhawk's productivity dropped off, as she started pet grooming school. She managed to continue work on the novel version of ''Past Secrets'' and also updated her website to it's current blue color scheme at that time. In August of 2004, her personal gallery, running on the first version of Gallery.

At this point, Snowhawk was only maintaining her personal gallery and her Side 7 gallery.

In May of 2005, Snowhawk's computer suffered a critical failure, and all of her art and writing work from the previous years was lost. Most of her backup CD-Rs failed to work, though she managed to recover a few files.

In late July of 2005, Snowhawk decided to expand her online presence and joined [[FurAffinity]], shortly before the site's first set of server problems.

From this point, she began to expand her online presence further, joining several art sites, some of which are now defunct. In addition to the sites listed above, she is/has been a member of [[ArtSpots]], [[deviantArt]], [[Inkbunny]], [[Furocity]], [[Furiffic]], [[Furry Art Pile]], [[SoFurry]], [[Storm-Artists.net]], [[Weasyl]].

== Online Aliases ==
Though she has been known longest online as Snowhawk, leading to her friends simply calling her Sno, she has had many aliases over the years. Throughout her earliest years online, especially in the #ev [[IRC]], she changed names frequently, being known as Ruby, Sophie, Gypsy, and Nytehawk, among others.

Starting in January of 2007, she was invited on board the team at [[fchan]] by her then-boyfriend, Raven, to help with moderating the site and responding to user generated reports. In the interest of not immediately associating her online and real life personas with a site that shares adult furry art, she adopted the name Samiya, and made the character to be at first an anthropomorphic [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saluki saluki], who later became a saluki/[[husky]][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husky] mix.

== Character/Creator Confusion ==
While Ashley goes by the name Snowhawk, she also has a character in her novel's world of the same name. The original Snowhawk was the character, having been created to solve a problem in the original writing of the novel. After a period of time, Ashley adopted the character of Snowhawk, replacing Nytehawk, as she had grown to associate more with the former while writing. She tries to distinguish between the two Snowhawks by only referring to the character by either her full name or "Snow" only. She prefers folks online to shorten her name to "Sno" if they wish to shorten her name. At one point, she distinguished between the two with character appearance, but has since adopted the character's final novel coloration.

== Other Online Presence ==
=== [[Second Life]] ===
She has used various accounts for Second Life, with Samiya Rossini being her first main account (now a male alt modeled after a character in her novel). This account was used mostly while she was an fchan moderator, and she could often be found in #fchan with the name "SLSami" or "Sami-SL". The surname was picked as it just "sounded good" with the first name. After a break from Second Life, she returned as Samiya, but decided to try to distance herself from the furry community for a time after encountering some hostility. The next account she used extensively was Misae Silverfall. Misae was the name of her World of Warcraft main at the time, and she picked Silverfall as homage to her real-life self's streak of silver hair. Her current account is Snowhawk Przhevalsky. As Second Life had not yet removed last names, she picked Przhevalsky as it is a type of wild horse, though a far cry build-wise from the usual Arabian breed she normally depicts Snowhawk as.

She enjoys creating in Second Life, owning a small shop in world, and has taken steps to learn how to create better items.

=== MMOs ===
Snowhawk is active in a small few MMOs at any given time. Her first was [[World of Warcraft]][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft], though she has not kept her account consistently active as she has in the past. She has been a beta tester and has a Founder account in [[The_Exiled_Realm_of_Arborea|TERA]][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERA:_Rising]. She is also active in [[Elder_Scrolls#The_Elder_Scrolls_Online|Elder Scrolls Online]][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Online]. Previously, she has been a tester for and played [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_World The Secret World]. She has also played [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XI Final Fantasy XI] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XIV Final Fantasy XIV].

=== Social Media ===
The first "social media"-esque site Snowhawk took to was [[LiveJournal]]. She has several accounts there, having hopped around various accounts, but has landed back on her original journal. She created various communities for subjects ranging from fish, dogs, and Dance Dance Revolution, to a once semi-successful role-playing community based on her novel's world.

She has ventured onto [www.plurk.com/ Plurk], [https://www.tumblr.com/ Tumblr], [https://twitter.com/ Twitter], and [https://www.facebook.com Facebook]. She also maintains a [https://www.blogger.com/ Blogger] site which chronicles her time in Second Life/InWorldz, WoW, TERA, and occasionally her real life.

== External Links ==
[http://avenstudios.net/ Aven Studios]

[http://snowhawk.livejournal.com/ LiveJournal]

[http://www.side7.com/gallery.cgim?member=snowhawk Side 7]

[http://www.furaffinity.net/user/snowhawk/ FurAffinity]

[http://damantru.blogspot.com/ Blogger]