Sherman's Sketchbook

Just a tired cog who'd much rather draw than do actual work. Mun is 21+

[shortsketches]

Casual realization I dipped for like a year lol. I get that I've been super sporadic for a long time but eh I'm feeling a little chatty so I'll elaborate a lil more.

So, where have you been?

Short answer, studying. Got my BS and fully tooting my own horn, graduated summa cum laude. (This however doesn't mean I'm necessarily smart as much as it means I just read and recall well 🤫) Unfortunately, I graduated into a dead job market and I've been stuck in the gig economy 💀

What have you been doing?

I've kept busy. Been a guest artist in a few zines, been making my own smaller zines and self-publishing, I have a webcomic, learned how to build puppets, got a lil more involved in costume design, really just kinda been doing a lot of different shit lol.

What about this blog?

I'll probably be around. When I'm not posting I do periodically log in (and I had been doing so for the past year just to poke around and see what's going on). Even when I'm off this blog for months, I'm technically always doing something toontown related somewhere offscreen

Where can I find you?

I live by the rule of being a social media luddite. I also tend to keep things more indirectly linked. I have like one or two social media accounts? (none of em are toontown related) If you know where to look you can find em 🤷 I'd prefer to not link em or share em directly unless I know you though.

Anyways, thanks for reading, hope you have a chill night

[shortsketches]

world's okayest cog disposer

(loudly hacking up dust as i temporary claw out of the dirt)

[shortsketches]

I'm seeing your art of Sherman, pre-toonification, with an arsenal of gags and the hints that he's used them to battle cogs and I'm 😱 and also curious as to what the opposite cogs' usually do to try and fight back against him? Sherman sounds terrifying to a cog's POV as the typical corporate culture attacks done to make toons sad are out of question.

OH this is fun because there’s a couple things going on here actually :^)

So, first thing, yes Sherman is an avid gag user. This kinda leads back into the fact that Sherman is some sort of anomaly that’s powered by Laff. This is important because some of the magic that makes gags actually work falls under the user’s capacity to comprehend toon humor and the ability to execute a joke which is a little hard for cogs to get sometimes. Any cog can technically use a gag, but it’s not a strong weapon unless the cog using it fully understands and resonates with the joke… Consider it like some form of manifestation of intent maybe?

So Sherman is a cog that runs on laff like a toon, which means he can get hurt like a toon too. I can see where people might assume cog-based attacks are off the table, but actually that’s kinda how you can kick Sherman’s ass outside of oldschool physical violence lmao. The catch tho is that like a toon, he has increased laff over time from running toon tasks and getting laff boosts which leads to an interesting setup where he’s technically a level 1 cog (never advanced at all on the corporate ladder) but has about 110 laff points? Regardless, he’s sorta a glass canon against the highest level cogs, especially so in regards to the bosses and he gets in a lot of situations where he has to pray that he can shoot faster than his opponent, because if he comes in at a disadvantage he can still get hurt pretty bad. (Luckily for Sherman, he -is- a good shot and usually gets to hit first.)

Despite being a competent gag user, Sherman is still a cog and has access to cog attacks. The fun surprise here is that he’s a Mistake™ that’s actually just a Tightwad that got sent down the wrong production line at the very end. He was originally meant to be a level 7 Tightwad, but since the factory didn’t wanna waste time fixing that, Sherman was sent out with a horribly sloppy and faulty drive wipe that failed to remove his memory of those Tightwad attacks, so he gets to double dip between a pool of both Short Change and Tightwad attacks… So you have a cog that runs off of Laff and recovers Laff like toons through gags like toonup or through goofing around; being hit with gags essentially does nothing to him and actually can make him feel better. His cog attacks aren’t as strong as other cogs, but given that he essentially has boundless stamina through Laff and the loop of replenishing it if he were being pelted with gags, he could be an absolute menace towards toons if he felt inclined to be that way. Thankfully for toons he doesn’t.

[shortsketches]

That time of the year again, let's go seafoam ⛵

[shortsketches]

In Search of a White Tulip

I don't typically paint with greys and browns so this was Interesting....

[shortsketches]

Thinking about the twins living with Chuck after Sherman essentially handed over custody for their own safety in main canon (since Sherman is about to dip and potentially make himself a target when trying to fight back the wack shit he started)

After moving to Toontown, Chuck's main occupation outside of passing Cog Nation secrets to the Toon Resistance is being a math tutor to toons; easy to say living with toons is a lot different from working with toons.

[shortsketches]

confession: when i first saw sherman (animatronic sherman, specifically, i didnt know he was a regular cog until i went to ur toontown tag) i thought he was this evil creepy guy trying to turn cogs into toons

To be fair, he would not be against swapping another cog over to an animatronic, but only if approached and the other cog seems serious about it.

He'd probably do it at low-or-no-cost too just because he personally enjoyed the process of building The Current Vessel™ and wouldn't mind having an excuse to do it again; the only catch here is that he's -very- hesitant about telling the other party that part of the reason he opted to stay a toon in that au was because he gave up on trying to swap back to the og cog body before realizing it was actually better for him to just live that life. So, it might be a one-way trip, but hey, he does technically give em what they asked for.

[shortsketches]

Some more misc. thoughts about toon animatronic Sherm.

Sherman tends to be physically active, so when he was building the animatronic, he tried to give himself little advantages here and there. One of these features was using the ears as an extra radiator; the fabric for the ears themselves (especially the inner ears) is pretty thin, breathable, meant to swap off extra heat to keep a lower operating temp (only really visible if you're blasting light at them). This was a sorta risky choice though since bigass ears can get injured easier; if sensors catch a drop in coolant pressure, access to lines in the ears automatically shuts off to prevent a leak and to maintain enough pressure to reach more critical components if something else is wrong.

He doesn't fight cogs as much as he used to when he was a cog himself, doesn't really do it for money anymore either, but he would never be a pacifist. If he feels like a cog is a threat he -is- going to throw hands and he's still pretty mean when he does it.

[shortsketches]

Thinking about the toon animatronic Sherman AU again lol

Searching for a way to transfer back to his og body after fucking around and finding out for lack of a better word wasn't going super well and he ended up putting that on hiatus out of frustration.

Stuck living under the guise of a toon, Sherman went ahead and began to ease his way into toon society working as a handyman. At some point he gets introduced to a recreational hockey team out in the Brrrgh from a client and decided to take a chance, forming a new hobby that he wasn't expecting to love so much.

Laying low as a toon ends up being good for Sherman there; by swapping over to the animatronic, he's presumed to be dead by those who were looking for him since he seemed to abruptly dip from the face of the earth, essentially giving him a blank slate. This doesn't mean his prior actions are to be disregarded because people were trying to snipe him for a reason.

Cue an unrelenting sense of dread since Sherman desperately doesn't want to lose the new relationships he's formed and the community he'd found himself a part of and he knows he'd lose that if they knew he was the same Sherman that nearly ruined everything for the toons. (I say nearly because this AU is a timeline where Sherman pulled back before finding his replicable method for making gag-tolerant cogs)

Really, Sherman is presented with a sense of belonging that he had never felt prior; over time he realizes that even if he was able to figure out what went wrong with transferring his consciousness over, he'd have a difficult time letting all that slip out of his grasp and he knows he isn't ready to confront that.

[shortsketches]

Something meant to be a companion piece to this

I think Kelvin would be a mycology fan and likes to spend fall mushroom hunting.

Wanted to follow through with the collage concept from Edna's piece; collected leaves from around campus on the last day of class.

[shortsketches]

Trying to figure out what the twins are about and I feel like Edna would be into scrapbooking; if you're nice, she might put you in it too.

Really wanted to have a juxtaposition of a desaturated toon with bright colors and shiny things; got to whip out some of my paper collection and my little drawer of stickers :^)

[shortsketches]

small misc. thing but since I've been playing around a lil more recently, if you see this in ttcc, that's me, feel free to say hi 🐰

[shortsketches]

Goofing around and thinking about how some of the blorbos would write...

[shortsketches]

Been getting into Corporate Clash recently, had a short change and a tightwad show up in a fight together and I felt a need to scribble down what Sherman's Setup™ is in that context (even though I'm generally working with TTR and TTO lore)

[shortsketches]

Hey, I just wanna say, I've been following your blog for a long while, and I wanna let you know that everything you post here is a delight. The characters, the story building, the artwork, every little bit of it. Genuinely, I get excited when I see the notification for your blog cause everytime I go "SHERMAN'S POSTING AGAIN". Keep up the fantastic work, buddy.

Good news is I don't particularly intend to stop even if I just kinda powerpoint opacity fade out for weeks or a few months haha

Thank you for the words, I really do appreciate them

[shortsketches]

My sister recommended me this account and wanted to say that Chuck has rizz

Chuck? Not looking like the grumpiest man ever built? More likely than you think! (He likes a little flattery every now and then, even if he probably has no idea what 'rizz' even means)

[shortsketches]

Bird jumpscare lmao

But uhhhhh, Thom Fletcher, bodyguard by day and cog-sanctioned hitman after hours. With Sherman out on the loose sniping cogs like a game of Duck Hunt and the Lawbots seemingly unable to secure him through more Conventional Means™, Cog Nation decided it was time to fight fire with fire.

A cog-hired hitman to take out the toon-hired hitman. What ensues is a weird endless game of cat and mouse with both parties ripping their hair out over the ordeal.