This Saturday, May 8 at 3PM Makers Local will have a class to teach the basics of silk screen printing. In just a few hours we’ll have screens ready to print single color images on paper, canvas or fabric. At the end of the class we’ll start hand printing our own tshirts with our Makers Local logo and other original graphics.

All you need to bring is a blank shirt and your own single color image. For example, our logo –

ML256 Logo
ML256 Logo
Screen Printing
Behold the final product!

Text is fine, any image file format will be okay. If you want help creating your own image, feel free to come by for this week’s Art Night, May 6 at 7 pm and we can make it happen.

Next Thursday, January 28 at Makers Local I’ll be teaching a class on the basics of GIMP. It’s a very powerful tool for editing imagery and it’s free, which makes it ideal for enhancing photos or graphics work. For a one night class, I’m going to cover the most basic tools, and the most obvious applications for first-time users, like touching up photos or creating a simple graphic or text editing. Benalene is going to help by going over the basics of InkScape, another freeware application which that has good vector graphics tools.

If you’ve got photos you want to touch up with common issues (weird lighting, red-eye, etc) we’ll show easy ways to fix them. Also, if you want some quick ways to add a little polish to imagery for a website, business card, or other personal project, we’ll talk about the most common techniques.

You’ll probably want to bring your laptop or netbook with GIMP and InkScape already installed so you can play with the tools we’re talking about as we go.

The date is set for Thursday, January 28 2010 at 7pm.