I’m a big fan of Philipp Lenssen, who does the Google Blogoscoped ‘blog. He recently announced a project of his own, Sketchory, at http://sketchory.com/. This site contains over 250,000 sketches, tagged, that are available for use under Creative Commons license.

You can do a tag search though Philipp warns that there is plenty more tagging to be done (you can tag some images while you’re here if you want to help out.) I did a search for pirate and got 27 results, from basic sketches to a couple of really cool ships to cartoons. (Most of the searches I did found perfectly fine content, though there were a couple that did have images that could be considered offensive. There is a link to flag images if you come across something objectionable.)

Once you’ve found something you like you can get a link to embed the image on your own site (the site has more information about CC sharing and remixing) or send the image to your friends. You also have the ability to look at the picture as an animation.

Now, I have very little visual acuity so this is what interested me most. Basically you can watch an animation of the picture as it was drawn. It was neat to see how images started and how they ended up. You can embed the animations as well, in addition to the finished pictures.

No, this site will not take the place of your stock footage library. On the other hand, few stock footage libraries would make me laugh this much. Just entering in random keywords found me some great pictures like “The giraffe is the lawyer of the animal kingdom”, and a three step, but slightly incomplete, profit making scheme using zombies. How refreshing after a long day at work. Great stuff Philipp.