Recently Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped, Nikolai Kordulla and Dominik Schmid have released Sketchory.com. Sketchory features over 250,000 drawings which you can share using a Creative Commons license. This license includes commercial sharing, so you could even, say, create a book out of sketches (with a maximum of 1000 images), or remix the drawings to create new stuff, and so on.

Who created all these sketches and where do they come from? The answer is simple, they all come from SketchSwap.com which is an amusing and addictive online drawing tool. It is a flash based site. There are no complex tools to draw or sketch. All you get is a simple, marginally thick brown color sketch pen like thingy. Just like  as if you we drawing something normally with a pencil or a paintbrush. No coloring or anything else can be done.

When you complete the drawing, you click on “Submit Drawing”. Now your drawing is swapped for another drawing by somebody else. Not only that, you get to see exactly how the other user came up with the drawing; the way all the lines were drawn, how it started and how it arrived to the end product. It is something like a video capture of the drawing in action by the person. The same applies to your drawing as well.

Philipp Lenssen said, “Today we open our new site which features over 250,000 drawings for sharing, remixing and more! You can also embed an animation of every image as it’s being drawn. The Creative Commons license also includes certain forms of commercial sharing, e.g. if you’d want to sell a book with cartoons from Sketchory (for up to 1000 sketches). Also, we hope that everyone can help tagging the pictures so that the exploration features and search will improve over time.”

Below are some of the sketches which I liked, thus selected to share with everyone. If you like to see more, then check out their website.