The summer's sometimes set aside for relaxation, recharging the batteries for the coming school year. As always, CLMOOC is here to help. One soummer-long project is a coloring book for you and from you. It's an activity you can "lurk" through, watching this Google Doc to get new pages from those who choose to submit them. You can create a page as you explore your artistic side. Maybe it will be a mostly random doodle. Maybe it will be artistic. Maybe it will be done by hand with a pen. Maybe it will be done with a digital tool you are learning to use. Those who create one (or a dozen) can share to individuals through email, share to all by posting at the same Google Doc. Everybody can explore their inner child by grabbing colored pencils, acrylic paints or traditional crayons, adding color to the posted pages. CLMOOC will be glad to host your photos of the pages you fill with color.
(click to enlarge)
sample page
With a soft deadline of Labor Day, September 4, 2017, we will compile all the submitted designs into a coloring book in beautiful pdf format suitable for you to use again and again through the years. And you don't have to stop submitting pages, either!
We'll have a "Make with Me" Hangout on July 11th. Starting at 1:00pm Eastern time, offering an hour of chat and engagement with a brief demo of how Algot Runeman designs a page using his favorite Free Software cross-platform tool, Inkscape.
A Twitter chat will also happen on July 13, also starting at 7:00pm ET
Carefully select an image to use as your guide. Every image has a copyright. It is automatic. The original author of a work holds the reins of their work. The key is the license the author chooses. The default license is "all rights reserved". When a work has all rights reserved, even if the author does not want to charge you, you must directly contact the author to obtain specific written permission for use each image, extended quote, chart, etc. It is up to the author to allow reuse. A group called The Creative Commons developed a series of licenses to help authors get credit for their work without having to make it difficult to manage rights. You should find images for this project which have a liberal license. Avoid the great ones which are "all rights reserved". Don't even think about it.
Flickr is a good source of images. During a search, you can specify the license, asking to only see the ones with a Creative Commons license.
Public domain images are always fair game. They are "no rights reserved". CC0 is the equivalent Creative Commons license.
Next best is Attribution (cc-by) for which you only need to identify the name of the author and a link back to where you found it (if possible). Attribution-Non Commercial (cc-by-nc) is probably next, but stop when you see "no derivatives" (cc-by-nd) in the license. These coloring book pages are derived from the originals we use. So, if you design your page from scratch, go for any design you want. If you use an image from the Internet, consider doing a Google Image Search like "public domain image bird"
This page, and the whole project is shared using the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) to promote wide reuse and sharing. Any work you creat belongs to you. You automatically own the image and hold the copyright if you contribute a page here. You start with total control, "all rights reserved", which gives nobody the chance to share your work as we plan to do. CC-BY 4.0 means that you decide to apply a change from total control to a license allowing CLMOOC to share/publish, but only if we make sure to put your name clearly on the page, attributing the work to you. CLMOOC will not own your work. You just give the group the the chance to make a pdf book to share on the Web. There are many other more restrictive Creative Commons licenses, too. You might want to look at them for future reference.