Background

Ash Framework is a flexible toolchain for building custom applications alongside another framework called Phoenix, hence the fire-themed name. I've been a part of the Ash community and associated discord server for a long time, and one day a friend generated a fun looking little flame using the DALL-E image generation model (see below).

I decided to have some fun redrawing the generated image as a little character. This was just a quick sketch, but I'm quite fond of how rough it is. This sketch was made in procreate with some of the standard paintbrushes that come with the app.

Ultimately, the community over on the Ash discord server spent a LONG time arguing over a name, and we settled on Ashley after many, many twitter polls. Ashley ended up being vectorised and cleaned up in order for them to be used as a discord emote.

While ultimately I do prefer the rougher hand-painted look, the vectorisation was a necessary part of making Ashley usable on the discord server. Turning them into an SVG also means that they can be scaled up for merchandise or print materials if the need ever arises.