To start, I have to delve rather deep...
I have always been an animal enthusiast...Surrounded by pets growing up, encouraged in my love for animals and nature. I enjoyed, and still do, watching nature documentaries of all sorts and spending time outdoors in the company of nature and wildlife. I love to birdwatch, fish, hike, and just be outdoors. I love to read, and so was constantly reading about animals. I am fascinated by life, and knew at a very young age that I wanted to work with animals "when I grew up." Likewise, I've always had a love for fantasy...Unicorns, pegasi, griffons, dragons...all things fantasy. I've drawn animals, and created my own strange creatures, since I could hold a pencil. Perhaps someday I'll dig out and redraw some of those scary old creatures.
When I was around 10, my brother introduced me to two things: Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and Dragonlance novels. I became hooked on both, and began reading all the Dragonlance books I could get a hold of. The first one I read was "The Legend of Huma", by Richard Knaack. This remains my favorite book to this day. When I read about the silver dragon in that book, something just clicked.
When I was 11 or 12, a good friend of mine began telling me she was a witch (which has since been explained away as ritalin-induced hallucination). She went into all sorts of detail, including the fact that everyone has an animal that represents them. A spirit animal, if you will. After many long conversations and picking apart of odd dreams, she determined that I was a sorceress, silly as it was. Along with an animal half, we were supposed to also have three different names: our given name, our nickname, and our spirit name. It all sort of bewildered me at the time. I knew instantly that my "animal" was a dragon. A silver dragon. As for the two other names, I had no idea. I thought on it long and hard, until it just came to me one day, out of the blue. I wish I could say that it was told to me in a dream or something equally deep and meaningful, but it didn't happen that way. I was just sitting there, thinking, and it popped into my head. I knew upon saying it out loud that it was my name, spirit or nickname, I didn't know, and frankly didn't care. I frequently "played" at phantom-shifting into Sidian. Ten years later, looking back, the whole thing is very silly, even absurd, but the name and "animal" stuck.
When I was 12, I made an AD&D character. I named her Sidian, and she was an elf with silver hair, like the shapeshifted silver dragons in the Dragonlance books. The whole weredragon concept came up shortly afterward, at which point the role play Sidian became one. I played her in AD&D campaigns with my local role play group (I usually DMed) for a couple of years before I found internet chats. When I did, my nickname was always Sidian. I didn't even have to think about it...it was just a given. I started out on Prodigy in cheesy teen chat rooms, until I found some free form role play rooms there, and started to frequent them. Again, I played Sidian, as a weredragon, usually just a dragon in elven form. I lost my Prodigy account, and was internet-less for almost a year, after which I found mIRC. I was 15. Clueless as I was, I just picked the server with the word "chat" in it, and ended up on chatnet. Again, I spent most of my time in teen chat channels, until I found a couple of role play channels and began frequenting them instead. All this time, I had still been playing Sidian the AD&D character, and by that time, the weredragon concept had become a bit more developed. I played Sidian on Chatnet, and came up with other characters to play as well, but they're not important to this story.
Two years later, due to some internet searches and the word of a friend, I found furries, and then Yiffnet. I loved the art and was intrigued by the fandom...at first, anyway. I decided, after some looking around, that me and my art could fit in there. It required giving the role play Sidian a bit of an overhaul, however...I made her "furry"; that is, I gave her "normal" clothing and a "normal" attitude, abandoning her RP history.  After quite some time in the fandom, I began to notice things about it that really didn't appeal to me at all. I met a lot of really fun and interesting people and fantastic artists. A fellow artist and fan pointed me to wolfhome.com, a graphical chat. The art there was done by Goldenwolf, an artist I had seen before and been very impressed by. I found out she lived an hour from me, and upon meeting her online, quickly arranged a real life meeting that weekend. We spent the entire night drawing and talking. She told me about therianthropy and her views, and again, something just clicked. Many long conversations, and one moonlit run in the mountains later, Sidian had taken on a whole new meaning to me. She was my other half, and I'd finally figured it out. My love for dragons was followed closely by my love for wolves, and for a while, I was fairly certain I was wolf as well as dragon. I figured out, with Goldie's help, that I'm fully dragon, with simply a great love for wolves. Perhaps the wolf is my spirit animal or totem...or perhaps I'm just a wolf fan.
These days things are much more clear to me, having finally come to terms with who and what I am, and who and what Sidian is, and what she means to me.

Drawing Sidian has always been an interesting undertaking, as her image has shifted and changed in my mind's eye. It's not always entirely easy to "see" her...It's like looking through a dirty, cracked glass window at her while she moves around. Bits and pieces come into view little by little, allowing me to only gradually piece together her whole. Thusly, she's changed a few times as my image of her has become more clear. A few things that have always remained constant, however...She's always been metallic silver; her horns have always been loose "S" curves; she's always had two silver earrings in each ear and a silver ring halfway down her left horn; her hair/mane has always been white; her eyes have always been ice blue. I've run into a few speedbumps along the way, but I'm fairly certain I've finally stumbled upon her true image..Or at least as near to it as I can get at this point. This is her evolution of image...

I first drew Sidian when I found the chatnet role play channels. In fact, all of my first drawings of Sidian related to role play. The drawing was of her in hybrid (anthro) form, and it was oooh so scary, and (fortunately) I lost it some time ago, and don't have it online to show. It was a pencil drawing, and showed my complete lack of any sense of proportion or anatomy. At the same time, I drew a picture of her dragon form, which I didn't lose...
This shows the true horror that was my drawing ability when I was 15. Fear it, my friends...fear it..

Second time I drew her was also fairly scary, and unfortunately, I have it to show...Her hybrid form.