When I was a kid, my mom would chuck my sister and me into the car and take us to our local library. While she disappeared upstairs to seek out the new Dean Koontz thriller, we’d explore the children’s section — a giant labyrinth of shelves and racks stretching on into infinity. It took me years to learn the layout of that place, but by the time I had it down, my favorite spots were permanently committed to memory. Walk in, straight back, right, then left. End of the aisle, three shelves up from the bottom: The drawing books. Specifically, the Ed Emberley ones.

For the uninitiated, Ed Emberley is the author of a number of drawing books for children, and the man who turned doodling into a science. In 1972 he released Make a World, a step-by-step manual with instructions on how to draw more than 400 boats, buildings, helicopters, cars, trucks, trains, ships, people and animals. The premise was simple. If you could draw squares, triangles, circles, and lines, you could draw anything in the book — from a bicycle to a battleship.

These weren’t complex or detailed drawings (the people were stick figures with hats), but that was precisely the point. Technique couldn’t be more boring to a 10-year-old, and besides, all the instructions were right here, laid out in Ed’s clear, numbered directions. Each step in the sequence showed exactly what you needed to add, whether it was a squiggle, a half-circle, or a crisscross pattern. All you really needed was a handful of crayons or markers and a sheet of paper. Flip to a page at random and you were off and running.

The book’s cover was a world of its own, containing oodles of Emberley’s signature simplified drawings, all of them lined up in neat little rows. Clouds at the top, ocean at the bottom. It was hardcover, and published in an horizontal format which made it seem all the more unique and important. I can remember plopping down on the library’s berber carpet and paging through it, rapt, and lost in its minutiae, picking out which items I’d draw first. I must have checked that book out a dozen times, sketching out my absurd fantasies on sheet after sheet of my mom’s typing paper.

As I grew up, I learned hundreds of other techniques and rules designed to increase my talents as an artist and designer. As my skillsets increased, so did my inspirations, and I gradually forgot about Ed Emberley’s world, losing myself in more adult styles of art and design. But recently I discovered an in-progress documentary (Make a World: The Film), highlighting the book and the artist behind it. Seeing the art again for the first time in years, I was a kid again, perched at the kitchen table drawing dragons and dump trucks with no care for the results. Creating to create — for the pure joy of it.

Ed’s passion for doodling is obvious and bleeds through all of his books, and it’s absolutely contagious. In the land of Make A World, there are no briefs, clients, Photoshop filters, or Flash animations. Art and passion like Emberley’s are what drove me to create, to dive headlong into a world of design and illustration, and I’m confident many of you probably have similar stories of passion. But unfortunately, “real life” tends to creep in and douse this excitement at precisely the moments when we need it the most. It’s refreshing to think about how effortless Ed Emberley made the act of creation — just sit down, pencil and paper in hand, and make a world.