#elkian

[Commission] Sketchpage of Ray (he/him) for @elkian! 🤍🩷❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤

sorry I didn't see this ask earler.

Ngl thinking of how you move is one point. Like in the tutorial I pointed out patience had to stick her elbows at far to wheel around her high armrests. but sadly I don't have a ton of other advice. it's also going to be physically harder for the character to move around in the less comfortable wheelchair, and if it's a hospital-like wheelchair its going to be very hard or impossible to do wheelies.

Sam: *cutting a sandwich with his ancient barrow-blade*

Hi! Thanks for the ask! This ended up being longer than I expected, so I hope that’s okay!

This is the only job I’ve ever had where I have fun every day. I get to use really complex, increasingly dangerous tools! Sometimes they break and my coworker and I have to take them apart and fix them, and sometimes we screw up so badly that we have to look at manuals for nearly 100 year old equipment and hope there’s a diagram in it so we can put it back together right. (My coworker is a great mechanic on their own, but when the two of us are together we have a single brain cell that we have to share.) I get to see all kinds of birds and watch rabbits do dumb things and make noises at foxes who think I can’t see them (and scare coyotes away sometimes.) 

I get to see the most beautiful things, like the way the snow swirls around the farm during a blizzard, the way the fog settles like a blanket, and the way the moon rises over the big shed. And the sunsets! I get to watch small birds build nests, raise their young, and teach them to live on their own. I get to watch a plant start from seed and eventually get to take fruit off that plant and pass it onto someone who always always smiles and says, “You grew all these?!”

I’m in love with my job, even on my worst days there (like this one! This has not been a good day but your ask has absolutely delighted me!) And every day, I fall in love with it a little bit more.

But you wanted a story, and my ode to farming has reminded me of a very cool thing I got to do last summer:

So, like, we have to cover our blueberries with netting to keep birds out of them, because birds love blueberries and if we don’t they’ll just devour everything and we’ll have nothing left. One of the problems with bird netting is that birds are tenacious little bastards and will do anything to get under that blueberry net. So three times a day, every day, I go around the farm checking all the bird netting for trapped birds. And I grab them, untangle them, and release them.

And one evening as I was getting ready to leave, I remembered that I needed to do my last bird walk. (I didn’t have to, my boss didn’t know I did them, but I felt so bad for the birds that got trapped in the netting, so I always checked.) So I went up to the acre of blueberry netting...

...and a red-tailed hawk had gotten his big, dumb foot caught in the blueberry netting while he was trying to catch a bird. And he was pissed about it! He was flapping and thrashing and screaming and really carrying on about the whole thing. And hawks, while really smart, are also really untrusting and really mean. And this thing is, like, twice the size of my backyard hens and has a beak twice as strong as my parrot. 

But I’m not going to leave him stuck in that netting, so I go over there, stoop down into the grass a few feet away, and start talking to him. He screams and flaps and makes an unholy racket, and when he’s finally tired himself out long enough to take a short break, I grab him behind the head so he can’t bite and flip him onto his back. 

If you grab a bird behind the head and wrap your thumb and forefinger around his neck so he can’t turn (but not enough to choke) then they can’t bite. It’s the tactic I use for trimming my parrot’s nails at home. A bigger bird, certainly, but still: only a bird and the same principle applies. My bird calms down and gets really submissive when you get her on her back, and the hawk was no exception. No screaming, no wing flapping, no trying to bite, but a quiet bird who peeped occasionally (And hearing a hawk peep is 110% one of the funniest, most adorable things I’ve ever heard.) So once I had him there, I was able to pull out my pocketknife with my free hand and cut him loose.

Then, with one hand still around his neck and the other grabbing his feet, I turned him rightside up and just kind of... yeeted him out of the blueberries. He flapped awkwardly through the air until vanishing, screaming, into the woods.