Would have to do some more testing but at first glance I'd say the problem is the first argument you are passing to the rotate() function.

According to the docs for Skimage: http://scikit-image.org/docs/stable/api/skimage.transform.html#rotate

rotate() takes a first argument an image in the format of ndarray. Your object (since you are using the 'novice' module, is of type according to my quick test.

Try something like:

new_pic = rotate(pic.array, 180)

pic.array is a direct reference to the underlying ndarray object stored in the novice 'Picture' object

EDIT: This gives you new_pic as numpy array! so you'll need to do the following to show it: