The Techie Art Nerdiness of a Saturday Morning

I'm in class but currently waiting for my screen to dry. I burned the images onto it, but once you do that, you need to wash it out and wait for it to dry before you can start pulling ink through it.

So I needed to come up with a composition for my silk screen class. We have to separate our image into at least five colors.

I gave it some thought, and then decided on stripes and flowers. These aren't necessarily the colors I'll use when I'm actually putting ink onto paper, but I wanted distinct colors on different layers so I could easily see the various stripes.

I made one layer with red stripes, one with blue, some of which overlap with the red, and one layer with just one yellow stripe. And then a layer with flowers. Oh, and a center of the flowers layer.

And then I learned something cool! Because I decided I wanted flowers, but I didn't want to print them over the stripes. I wanted flower cut-outs instead. And could I get rid of the parts of stripe where the flowers are?

Yes! And when my colleague taught me this I was so excited. Yippee! "Ooh! It's magic!"

"Yes. But it's actually called 'masking'".

I also learned that Photoshop has different brushes. When I was drawing the flowers I was trying to choose a brush. And it turns out there are brushes with butterflies. You can draw lines comprised of little butterfly images! Or swirls, which look more like nipples, in my opinion. Or a blue gajillion other options!

I was dancing in my chair, I was so nerdishly-excited to learn these things.

"Ooh! Ooh! Look! I'm drawing with butterflies! Ooh! It worked! Stripes gone where the flower is! Ooh!"

My two colleagues who know this stuff in and out were just laughing at me.

I absolutely love learning things like this. There are soo many things you can do in Photoshop. Now I want to take all my photos, open them in Photoshop, and cut flowers or butterflies or swirls out of them. Just because I can!

And then I am going to screen a shirt for myself that says "mega nerd" or something like that. If you have suggestions, I'm open to them.