Noodle, doodle and Nodd

Some retail stores transcend their material origins, like Pinocchio, and acquire a soul.

In a few short years, Odd Nodd Art Supply owners Casey and Whitney Sorrow have woven a cozy, colorful and indispensible nest for professional artists, art students, crafting enthusiasts, seekers of art therapy and people who have no idea what they need.

The Sorrows put their hearts into the store, along with their considerable expertise in fine art, crafts (at all levels of skill) and other artistic pursuits.

“I like the customers who are like, ‘I can’t even draw a stick figure,’” Whitney said. “It doesn’t matter if you can’t draw. There’s so much value in putting colors together, putting lines together, just the sound of a pen on a nice piece of cotton rag. There’s therapy in so much of it.”

The Sorrows have packed a teeming coral reef of art supplies into the sunlit brickwork interior of their Old Town digs at 317 E. César E. Chávez Ave., next to a set of defunct railroad tracks.

OKTO sensory art clay is one of many new products that lure newbies into glorious, creative messes

But the diverse inventory, from fountain pens out of a dream to the newest 3-D sculpting media, only tells half the story.

“When my father died, the grief was so deep that for about two months, I would sit with a ream of copy paper and make fine, intricate doodles,” Whitney said. “It was the only thing that grounded me, and it was then I realized that looking at art as what products you create is so limiting. It’s really about the process. That’s where the magic happens for me.”

For Casey, a printmaker and illustrator, the social part of running a store is the perfect complement to the often-solitary work of an artist.

“We’re kind of like the bartenders of the art world,” he said. “A lot of people come in here and talk to us about anything.”

During the pandemic, Odd Nodd’s staff helped hundreds of people find a way to express themselves, distract themselves and blossom in unexpected ways.

Last week, in the aftermath of a bruising election season, traffic again ticked up.

“Yesterday, a few people came in looking for therapy through art, and I feel it’s pretty important to be here for people,” Casey said.

The store is a haven for so many people in part because Casey and Whitney came to the art world from different directions.

Casey grew up in Holt and hitched his early love of doodling to the world of Dungeons & Dragons, at first copying the monsters from the game, then inventing his own. (His self-published bestiary, “Bizarre Monsters,” is quite a trip.) Longtime Lansing-area dwellers may recall him as co-author with Eric Millikin of of the comic strip “Fetus X,” banned from Michigan State University’s The State News after a condemnation from no less a hater than then MSU President M. Peter McPherson.

While studying at MSU, Casey had his first experience with an independent art supply store, Grand Arts Supply in downtown Lansing.

As manager of MSU’s art supply store, Casey worked regularly with Grand Arts Supply owner Greg Limmer. When Odd Nodd opened in 2019, Limmer passed Casey his pricing gun from his store, which closed in 2015. Casey’s prints have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times.

The gems in Casey’s portfolio are his illustrations for two books of previously unpublished James Joyce material, “The Cats of Copenhagen” and “Finn’s Hotel.” Both have appeared, with Casey’s illustrations, in many international translations.

“Casey has a fine arts background, and he can get deep into that with people who are trained,” Whitney said.

Fitting everything he wants to sell into Odd Nodd’s Old Town store is “a slide puzzle that keeps me up at night,” co-owner Casey Sorrow said.

By contrast, Whitney has always poured her creativity into crafts, “hyper-focusing on a million different things” like beadwork and clay modeling. She grew up in East Lansing, spent some time living on both the East and West coasts and returned to the area to be near family.

About 15 years ago, when Casey was teaching an art class at MSU’s Kresge Art Museum, one of his students passed a hand-bound book to Whitney.

“It sort of made my brain explode,” she said. She dove headlong into bookbinding and now divides her time between bookbinding and embroidery.

Casey estimated that about half of his customers are either fine artists working professionally in the area or students at MSU or Lansing Community College buying supplies for courses. The rest, he said, are hobbyists “or people who are just interested in playing around with artistic materials.”

“We love introducing new products and projects to people to get the creative juices flowing,” Casey said.

A light, soft clay that can be “painted” into 3-D artwork, made by Ukraine-based manufacturer OKTO, is a new product that’s catching on fast.

Another counter bristles with smooth, rich Blackwing pencils crafted from Japanese graphite and California cedar, the flat-ferruled axe of choice for creative minds from animator Chuck Jones to composers Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein to literary lions like John Steinbeck and Vladimir Nabokov.

The stationery and fountain-pen counters have become the hubs of thriving artistic subcultures. A selection of beautifully made journals, many of them from Japan, challenge you to come with thoughts worthy of their creamy paper. There are travel journals, bullet journals (for focus and productivity) and good old figuring-life-out journals, a solace and life raft during the pandemic.

Odd Nodd’s fountain pen department is tops in the state, drawing fans from hundreds of miles away. The Lansing Analog Society, a devoted group of pen, ink and paper aficionados, meets regularly at the store.

“Come to a meeting,” Casey said. “You’ll get sucked into a rabbit hole.”