From Pablo G. Capistrano, a.k.a. pum chak (o.-) – Play ball!

State Library and Archives of Florida	pum chak (o.-)
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Among Oliver Flores‘ wonderful range of illustrations are several based on Commons photographs. In this one, linked to by Penny in the Flickr Commons group, he isolated the main figures from the background, and brought out their infectious joy:

Library of Congress	Oliver.
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From the State Library of New South Wales, the Powerhouse Museum, the Library of Congress, and three other Flickr members, we’re delighted to present Vintage Dredge, by FrodoBabbs:

Smithsonian Institution	Caroline Tamtama (tamtama)
THEN	NOW

Caroline Tamtama loves Commons photo remixes so much that she’s created a separate group just for sharing and talking about those. Are you also Inspired by the Commons?

Liz West (muffet) has been remixing other people’s photos with her own to create new, imagined images, and giving back to the remixing community as well. Recently she reimagined a historical image from the Library of Congress, bringing it together with a fellow Flick member’s self-portrait, a Buddha statue, and a borrowed texture — and creating a new, stranger war than Captain Felix’s presented itself as. See Liz’s Captain Felix for all the credits.

Library of Congress: Capt. Felix of Army Aero. Corps

Liz West: Captain Felix

Welcome back to the Craft Cabin, where we play with art supplies and Flickr Commons images to make cool stuff. Today’s project: the stenciled t-shirt.  We don’t have detailed instructions here, because there’s a whole Flickr group, Freezer Paper Stencils, with a tutorials thread – pick the one that works for you.  What you’ll soon realize is that they vary in specifics, but the basic idea is this:  make a stencil on freezer paper, iron the stencil to a t-shirt, and apply paint (fabric paint or spray paint). It’s easier and quicker than it looks, and fun to do with kids — adults should obviously wield the Xacto knife, hot iron, and spray paint, but that still leaves a lot of participation opportunities for young artists.

For best results, choose an image that’s already pretty simple and high-contrast — as I did below with the portrait of Portuguese actress Beatriz Costa (from the Biblioteca de Arte-Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian). Or just make an outline stencil of something more elaborate — this  baseball action shot would be well suited to that approach. Architectural features are also interesting to stencil. Think about the image a bit before diving in — which parts will you cut out?  Which parts will remain the color of the t-shirt?

Working with images like this — really sitting down and studying their composition, cutting and painting with them — is a great way to engage with the riches of the Flickr Commons. And when you wear a piece of the Commons, you’re inviting conversations about the photo, how you found it and why you chose it. So choose wisely, and enjoy the opportunity to share what the Commons project is all about.

Printing out the stencil onto freezer paper.

The stencil after cutting.

Ironing the stencil onto a t-shirt.

After first of several rounds of spray paint.

The big reveal peel!

Cooler than a Hannah Montana shirt, right?

Imagine being a new reader at your current age — maybe you’re learning a new language, maybe you’re coming to literacy later in life for other reasons. You want to practice, but what kind of beginning-level readers are in your local library? One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish is funny, sure, but you’d prefer to learn about useful and interesting topics relevant to an adult life, wouldn’t you? Or maybe you’re a teenager, a high school student who is working hard to learn about the same topics as your peers who can read fluently. It’s easy to get discouraged when you can’t find any books that meet your needs.

These are the gaps addressed by Tar Heel Reader, a collaboration between the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina (thus the name). Tar Heel Reader, launched a little over a year ago, offers

“a collection of free, easy-to-read, and accessible books on a wide range of topics. Each book can be speech enabled and accessed using multiple interfaces (i.e., switches, alternative keyboards, touch screens, and dedicated AAC devices). The books may be downloaded as slide shows in PowerPoint, Impress, or Flash format.”

Gary Bishop has a more technical explanation of the way it all works here.

Tar Heel Reader books are created by users all over the world, in various languages, using a book-writing “wizard” that accesses Flickr images (only those with amenable licenses, and always credited to the owner) to illustrate the books. As I write this, there are over 4,600 books available — and I’ve made 67 of those.

This week, Flickr Commons images were added to the already rich supply of images available to Tar Heel Reader authors. To try out the new options, I made two books using only Commons images. WWII: Women Working spotlights the gorgeous color photos of wartime factory workers in the Library of Congress uploads; and Ellis Island tells a first-person story of early-20th-century immigration, using the New York Public Library’s uploads on the subject, mostly the portraits by Augustus Sherman, Chief Registry Clerk. Thematic sets like these are easy to convert into picture books — the images (from a given era, or even by one photographer) share a look that gives a book a stronger visual identity, and they’re already focused on a specific topic.

Library of Congress

New York Public Library

I’ve used current images to make books about voting, First Amendment rights, air travel, thriftshopping, hats, popcorn, gingerbread houses, Groucho glasses, you name it; but for making books about history, historical images are invaluable. Which is why I’m excited and grateful to have Flickr Commons images to play with at Tar Heel Reader. And I think the readers and teachers will be happy to see them too.

This series has to be some of the most wry humor in the Flickrverse. Taking old Bains News Service photographs from the Library of Congress, thatoliverguy adds text in the same handwriting style as the original, and a dash of humor too. We can’t wait to see more of his clever work. You’ll want to click through to read the new captions Oliver’s given the classic photos.

Library of Congress	thatoliverguy
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See more here and here. And do imagine his photo titles as spoken very matter-of-factly.

Remember summer camp and craft projects?  It’s that time of year again. Most Indicommons readers don’t get to spend a week in the woods anymore, twisting yarn around sticks, making sunprints with ferns, or gluing tissue paper to stones. So consider this post a virtual trip to the craft cabin. In this tutorial, we’ll make a set of four quick-and-easy cards with Commons images and a few ordinary office supplies. Never get caught without a perfect card again!

For my examples (above), I used the Field Museum Library’s wonderful World’s Columbian Exposition set, which includes prints, photographs, and ephemera related to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the “White City” where the first Ferris Wheel appeared, among other wonders. (Across the Commons, the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian Institution have also posted images from the World’s Columbian Exposition.) But the idea can work for any images you like, so do explore the possibilities.

1. First, lay out two sheets of images: one for your backgrounds, and one for your foregrounds. For the background sheet, I copied and pasted the images of tickets from the Commons, in a collage pattern. Change the sizes as you see fit, and adjust the colors and contrast so that they’re mostly black-and-white (save your printer ink). For the foreground sheet, I copied and pasted an image of the Ferris wheel four times.  Choose a strong image that won’t be a huge hassle to cut out, and (again) you can adjust the contrast and colors for your purposes.

2. Print out each sheet onto white cardstock. Your pages should look like these:

3. Cut each sheet into quarters. If you stop here, you have eight postcards:

4. Cut the background rectangles slightly smaller (your printer probably left white edges — cut those off).  Now add a bit of color with ink pads, markers, pencils … whatever’s handy. Darker in the corners and edges, lighter toward the center, will usually give a good effect. Or you can leave the backgrounds alone and color the central image instead.

5. Cut out the central images from the foreground rectangles.

6. Use a gluestick or double-stick tape to mount the backgrounds to folded cardstock (I used some dark green and red scraps here), then add the central image:

That’s it! You’ve made four cool cards without a trip to the art supply store, thanks to Flickr Commons.

Clone Trooper: What? What are we looking at??

Powerhouse Museum	im.mick
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