Steve Emig stopped at the Forsyth County Public Library's downtown branch last August to escape the heat.
He noticed a display of sketchbooks, and when he asked about them, a librarian told him that he could draw whatever he wanted.
So he did: an outhouse and some sketches about the 94-degree weather.
Then Emig, who had drawn before, forgot about them.
When he came back about a month later, he saw his drawings in a book, along with several others.
His drawings had become part of the library's Leave Your Mark project, which provides sketchbooks in which library patrons can leave drawings or words.
The project was originally founded in March 2009 as Visual Libraries by Maureen O'Neill and Claire Sambrook, lecturers at the University of Portsmouth in Britain.
"We were hoping to increase the number of people using libraries in different ways," Sambrook said.
O'Neill and Sambrook were in town this week to see how Winston-Salem's sketchbooks were going. They were extremely pleased with what they saw.
There are no rules, and people can draw as much or as little as they want.
"The moment you set up rules, you're asking people to break the rules," O'Neill said.
Many sketchbooks have a theme to pique people's interest. In a book about food, for instance, people could leave behind their favorite recipes. Another book might suggest that people go outside and take leaf rubbings, or list their favorite things. Some people will leave comments in the margins of drawings they like.
Winston-Salem learned of Visual Libraries when reference librarian Candace Brennan stumbled upon its website just a month after the project was begun.
The library received a $200 grant to buy 18 journals, and the city became Visual Libraries' second location, the only one in the United States. There are now 36 journals patrons can add to.
"From there, we just took off like a shot," Brennan said.
O'Neill and Sambrook's next stop is India, where they'll travel next month to set up a third project. Eventually, they hope to take all the books on tour.
Brennan hopes to expand the project to the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University and to Urban Artware downtown.
Although children love the sketchbooks -- dozens were rapt during workshops the founders gave when they were in town -- the project has wider appeal.
"It's more important for adults, I think," O'Neill said. "When you're a child, you have absolute and total confidence in drawing. You just do it. But as people grow, they lose their confidence to be creative."
Emig agreed, and he's hardly the only adult to contribute. He said that as an artist, the success of the project heartened him.
"There's a ton of people with talent out there who never really do much with it," he said. "I think every library should do this."
smorayati@wsjournal.com
727-7270
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement