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- Welcome to the Dakota Live detours.

A good canvas should never be blank.

When a hand, a brush and paint come together in the right way, magic can happen where art is the result.

In this episode of Dakota Life, we'll introduce you to two artists who start by sketching and then let their creativity take control.

But first we'll take you to Aberdeen to meet Brad Earhart who uses his woodworking skills to make pens.

Brad says, pen making is more than just a hobby, it's a stress reliever - In here.

- We're in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

Step into my studio.

For every different type of pan pipe, you have to have different bushings.

And these are bushings for a gun metal bolt action click panel, which I'm gonna be making.

It started about in 2015.

My older brother, Mitch, was in the Navy and he was stationed out in Seattle, I think it was called Bremerton Substation.

And he was turning pens.

And so when I first started at court services, wanted to have a pen made for everyone in my office.

Well then my boss at the time got interested in it and I think he went up to Eureka and found a auction cell where they had like a band saw a drill press and a good turning lathe.

And he started working on pens.

So then we went to Tennessee and there was a Woodcraft store up there and we got some pen blanks and I made my first pen.

It was actually a tiger colored orange and black acrylic pen.

The most important thing is a sharp chisel.

And then I just built it from there.

You know, got, got my, you need a bandsaw and a drill press, of course.

And then I started making stuff on my own.

And it was just as I, if I get an order, then I'll make a pen for somebody.

So I get the money from order it through a company in Pennsylvania, it's really a, not only a hobby for me, but it's, it's a stress reliever.

You know, when I make a pen, it's, I just, I zone out and I get, make 'em a pen.

That's it.

So that's how I got started and that's, you know, where I am today with it.

I made a piece of deer antler for the blank of the pen.

And so I've got a whole tub of deer antlers and then I got some other ones.

So you have to cut it to about the length you need for the pen.

And so for a bolt action pen that you saw, it's about two, just shy of two inches.

So I cut it a little longer and I put it up in that drill press.

And I drill the hole with the drill bit.

I drill hole through it.

And every pen kit, every different pen type has basically a different size drill bit, right?

So I drill through it.

I glue that brass tube that comes in the kit in there.

You have to believe it's set for like 20 minutes.

I've got some spray accelerator that white can up there and that works really well.

And then I have two bits that I can drill into there to size it down to the length.

And then I have a, a box there with the different bushings.

And so I know how far down to take it.

So then I mount it on the, the lathe and then I turn it down to size.

I have sandpaper and, and polish and then a and then a DR. Press there that you can press 'em together.

I usually have pretty good luck with wood in the antler.

The most technical is the acrylic because sometimes that's brittle and it chips.

And so I have to order two because I have to expect that probably chips I cannot use like sheds that lay out in the, in the elements 'cause they get bleached out.

But like the inside is marrowy, but the outside is more of the bone part or the harder clearer white.

So about two inches, three inches of straight thick antler.

And then I always thought, what am I going to do with the extras?

Like this piece, this was what I'd use to make a deer antler coat rack or a hat rack so you can mount it right on the wood.

I've made a few game calls.

They have duck calls, rabbit calls, coyote calls, wine stoppers, bottle stoppers.

And it takes time.

You know, you learn different tricks from people that already know.

If it's something you're interested in, you know, talk to somebody and find out how to get involved in it.

I get some breakage and you know, it's not necessarily a disaster, but there's ways to fix it.

If I'm turning something and it breaks, you can actually take that and grind it up, put a little glue on there, super glue and take that fine grindings and put it on there and press it in there and then sand it down.

And sometimes you can't even tell that it broke.

You know, I grew up camping and hunting and fishing and I just enjoy that.

That's kind of a way to preserve that.

I think - Brad encourages others to take up this relaxing and rewarding craft or any hobby that they love.

It's important for them to find what they enjoy building and then follow their passion.

James Pollock has been drawing in painting for as long as he can remember.

He was born and raised on a ranch on the plains of South Dakota and his hometown, Pollock, South Dakota was named after his great-grandfather.

James says a piece of paper should never be blank.

He also says he's not quite sure where his drawings come from.

Sometimes he just lets go of the pen in his hand and sees what happens.

- Everything you look at is, goes back to somebody did some sort of a sketch of it.

And, and so art and sketches are a part of everything.

And that's being built in, in this world at some point in time.

Little color into it, or it may be just a rough sketch and then put it in their computer and, and more details than the engineers do there, whatever they gotta do to make it work.

And, but someplace along the line, there's a sketch involved.

It's such a quiet night tonight.

It's not always that quiet.

Well, there's not enough room here where I live.

So they ended up in storage because I rented some space.

But the, the, the real story is that the space I rented was quite large and everything was organized and the landlord decided that he was gonna put somebody else in this larger space.

And they moved me into a little bit smaller space.

I had it sort of organized over there where I knew, you know, my original paintings, the big ones are here and my sketchbooks are here and my photographs are here, and, and, and my writing stuff is over.

Whatever it was, I knew kind of where it was.

And now I just gotta look through a box and see what's, it surprises me sometimes what I find, ah, here's some, these are white ones from 1980 and 1990s.

These sketchbooks are all the white, when they, when they had a white cover on 'em, they typically had nonobjective things and if they got a black cover, they were more, they traditional outdoors landscapes, things like that.

Now I'm looking, these are from 90, 19, nineties.

Oh, there's the black ones here.

These, the, the black ones.

This is state fair people.

I don't know what's the, what's in here.

These are sketches supposedly I did at the state fair.

I've always been interested in, in going out and sketching and, and drawing.

And it's not necessarily, I don't have to have something in front of me.

I, I like to draw out of my imagination.

I call those little drawings that I do out of my imagination.

Intuitive drawings.

I don't know how, how page got blank.

A piece of paper should never be blank.

I'll put up, I kind of put a person on there, there.

Now we don't have a blank page, so I dunno how that got blank.

I'm not sure where they come from.

Sometimes I just let my hand in the pen, in the ink or whatever tool I have in my hand, go and see what happens.

And, and then I might look at it and say, well, I need a little something here and a little something there.

And I'll add something to it.

And pretty soon I got a drawing.

Pretty soon I got a lot of drawings.

If I got enough paper, you know, I go through a lot of paper.

Yeah, there's several pattern techniques I developed and that's almost got like a musical pattern to it.

Music and art have a lot in common I think.

And you know, with the relationships, a rhythm and rhythm and beat and they're, they're just a close relationship I think.

I don't know what's gonna become of all the fire, but it's interesting to me sometimes.

The first piece of art that I'm aware of that still exists today was a, a watercolor.

And it's called God in a Storm.

I was born in, in the spring, in May.

My birth mother, she died in December of that year.

There was a lady and she was my aunt, aunt Lottie.

And she was the first grade teacher at the same time.

But I used to go over to her place and she'd get out to watercolors.

I think she's the one that kind of instilled into me the art.

Of course that piece of art is, looks like any other kid.

But she told me it was special and I believed her.

It was special.

And I, I think that contributed to my interest in art.

Anyway, basically.

I think that's basically what I have is a profound interest in art.

I like this one because it shows the lines, the basic lines.

When people draw, a lot of times they put too much into it.

And if you can get the essence of the, of the scene that you're trying to draw with a minimum of lines, that's what I'm always trying to, trying to get.

I don't have so much talent.

I've worked awful hard in my life to, to draw and I'm still working at it, you know, and I just keep on sketching, but I still not up to the level that I would like to be as a, as a sketcher.

But I work at it every day.

Yeah, some of these older pictures, I think I did better than I do now.

I don't understand this, how you get worse instead of better, but the longer you draw, I am kinda liking it to, I, I try to, I work on this every day.

I, I do some sketches and I do stuff off TV and I work at it and I try to, I'm trying to get it to the point where I can draw just like I can write, you know, and people, if people can write, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to draw.

And, but it, it is really difficult.

1, 1, 1 thing that helps me in drawing is looking at seeing shapes and seeing what's actually there instead of thinking what's actually there.

Like if you're drawing a person, you kinda say, well, I, this head look should be here or that, you know, arm should be over here.

It should look like that.

Instead, if you look at that as maybe it's just a shape.

And it's hard to do that in a person.

Yeah, well those guys like, remember that and Michelangelo, this, it's amazing what they could do with a pen and ink and a pencil.

There's just something about tactile quality of having a pen in your hand and drawn on paper.

I don't have anything against these computer generated art or anything like that because I would, I did that for a while, but I always fall back to, to paper and pencil and paint and watercolors and whatever.

That's, that's what I like.

And I guess whatever somebody likes, that's the kind of medium they should use.

I said it's one of the things that's sitting out here in nature.

You can hear the birds chirp.

You can hear, hear, hear 'em out here.

It's such a quiet night tonight.

It's not always that quiet.

Well, I just wanna remembered as somebody that tried to be an artist and worked at it and left a paper trail with ink on it, you know, but that's about all I can say.

Whether that paper trail on ink is any good or not, if somebody else can decide that.

But I, I just keep on putting marks on paper and, and whatever happens, happens at this point, it doesn't make any difference anymore.

I, I've been, I've been around a long time.

Mountain Magic, that's the title on that one.

That's from the Ian Learning Center.

Pow wow.

What is it here?

You can see this is, this is, they call it a double bison in 1987.

But there, here's a piece of a computer generated art that I did.

It says couple on flying carpet, I suppose that's the flying carpet.

Oh, sketches, loose sketches.

I start out with some little thing and then I add and I add, add a little more and I end up with that.

Just really find some odd things in these boxes.

It's clouds, I guess.

So that's what it says.

Clouds, it says copies of sketches.

South Dakota Magazine.

There's a beach scene.

I mean, you, you look around this place and we're just been in one spot all the time.

Who knows what's in the rest of this place.

There's just, there's thousands of those drawings and I don't know what's gonna happen to that stuff when I, when I'm gone.

I hope it doesn't go to the dump, but who knows?

It might.

Lot of sketches in there.

That's what I like to do with Sketch - During Vietnam.

Pollock served as an army combat artist in 1967 to learn more about his experiences and those of fellow combat artists.

Steven Randall go to Sdbs YouTube page and search Dakota Life, the Art of War.

Now let's meet Michael Britt, Martinez ii or Mikey for short.

Mikey has an educational background in business but felt that pursuing business was not his passion.

He feels that he's a newcomer to the world of illustration, specifically the comic art form in which he has so much room to grow.

Mikey says that comic art for him personally is the most relevant and modern branch in the oldest form of storytelling.

- If art were languages, then illustration would be my primary language.

It's kind of beautiful.

My name is Mikey and this is my art space.

Please step into my studio.

Morning sessions are really about having fun.

So it's not even like this has to be done before this or this has to be, sometimes it does just 'cause like the airbrush kinda locks in certain things.

I like to play with a couple different charcoals, so I like to see how those smear.

And then I'll, I'll mess around with the airbrush.

There might be a couple pencil stages in between there where I'm rendering out shapes or something.

And then at the end of it is just inking that's locking in the line details.

Maybe a little more darker pencil shade to kind of help blend.

And then if I wanted to, you could just, I could load that up into a digital space and start getting some effects in there.

And I think illustrators are lucky that illustration can be applied towards all of the mediums.

Do comic book covers, do comic book interiors, do inks, do colors, do all that.

If I just had one medium, it would just be a pencil look.

There's just too much you can do with a pencil.

It's kind of basic, kind of just pencil think coloring book turned into, I prefer blank piece of paper to do my own.

Maybe there's something there like maybe I didn't like being the boundaries of a coloring book.

And so it was just like, no, I'd rather draw my own Ninja Turtles doing whatever they do.

Yeah.

And so then it was more of more of other people telling me, oh Mikey's an artist.

Oh he's artistic.

Oh, it's almost like singing.

You just don't identify as a singer, but you can sing.

That's probably why a lot of the reasons why I didn't really pursue it went to business school and all that.

Just like, ah, it's just something that makes me happy.

I went down to San Antonio 'cause my dad's from Texas, so I got state tuition to go down to school there.

Lived with my grandparents, did business school, went through that whole thing, got a job with the travel industry, was setting up to go do my international business stuff.

That project was going to India to help with the call center there.

And everything kind of just kind of got pulled from underneath me and so it wasn't under my control kind of thing.

If I can do, if I do everything I'm supposed to do and it still gets pulled under from under me, then I might as well be doing something that I actually wanna see, like develop.

So I was like, I've always believed in my potential.

So over the last like 10 years, it was self study, reeducating myself on everything that applies in the arts for me.

Most of it was illustrator based I, however, with National Lampo for a couple years it started out as like single piece political art stuff and then it moved on to more detailed stories.

A blank sheet of paper is a beautiful thing.

It's kind of like a child in the sense that there's like, there's endless possibilities of what's the potential.

It's just like the ether of imagination.

Like there's nothing, like not cannot be beautiful in some sense.

That's one of my favorite things is like that giant stack of printer paper that's kind of like basketball practice.

Like those are my practicing free throws.

It's to get in that habit of just burning through ideas.

And it's kind of like the, it is just a thing.

The more you practice, the more things are gonna come naturally.

So if anything, it's a lot of like, by doing those, it helps me save time later on because I don't have to think about things.

I think anybody that's pursuing illustration needs to really hone down your anatomy, facial anatomy and the perspective that goes with that.

And once you hone down a couple of different things, you can apply that to everything.

It's kind of magical when you think about it.

'cause it's not, I don't really think about certain things and it just peers, it just kind of does its own thing.

I love checking out people's art and I love talking to 'em about it.

And I love hearing their process and the things that they like or even the tools that they like or the tools they don't like.

And I learned that every year is to have a little bit more patience with myself in the process.

It's frustrating though.

It's mad frustrating.

There's a lot of that when you're developing as an artist too though, where it's like, you know what point you wanna be at and you're, and you're slowly developing to that point, but it just doesn't come fast enough.

And it's always, you're always, that's not good enough.

I feel like that blank piece of paper applies to a lot of things.

And in the arts I probably view a lot of things as the open piece of paper.

Maybe that's why I wanna move on to new stuff all the time is 'cause I enjoy that possibility.

So whenever something is already locked in, I, I feel like, oh no, where there's still more out there.

So, and that's ano, that's another thing where it's like compromising, finishing something.

We're moving on to the next biggest curse of every creative.

I can definitely imagine doing other things out, doing other things.

And that's dreadful to think about.

Like I'm pretty lucky that's still art every day.

Even if AI takes over every facet of art, I don't know that I, that it would take away any joy I have from that big stack of printed paper.

- The spark for Mikey was reading the comic series, the Watchman by Alan Moore.

He says that he got a feeling in his gut that somehow, some way he would figure out a way to do this.

And he did.

The South Dakotans, we've introduced you to all followed their passion in pen making, drawing, painting, and illustration.

South Dakota artist Harvey Dunn once said, merely knowing your craft will never be enough to make a picture.

If you ever amount to anything at all, it'll be because you are true to that deep desire or ideal, which made you seek artistic expression in pictures.

As we continue our travels across South Dakota, meeting folks and telling their stories of Dakota life, we'll take more detours along the way and tell those stories of our state's culture, heritage, and way of life.

For all of us at SVPB.

My name is Tim Davison.

Thank you for watching.

- Hey.