Ainsley Evergarden

Ainsley Evergarden, also/formerly known as Snowahwk Alyandra,D'Amantru, or przhevalsky is a furry artist and writer, and a moderator for Artists Beware. 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 Batman Returns and "pretend play" with one of their friends. This eventually led to 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 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 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 cartoons), 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 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 saluki, who later became a saluki/husky 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, dogs, and Dance Dance Revolution, to an once semi-successful role-playing community based on their novel's world.

They have ventured onto Plurk, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. They also maintained a 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.

External links

This person is a WikiFur user: Snowhawk's user page Snowhawk's talk page

• Delphin.Digital Current Website
• Aven Studios (defunct; archive from 2018)
• EverAinsley on Fur Affinity
• Ainsley on Inkbunny
• ainsley on Weasyl
• EverAinsley on deviantART
• EverAinsley on SoFurry
• Ainsley on Side 7
• Ainsley Evergarden and Damantru on Dreamwidth
• Snowhawk Alyandra on LiveJournal