Hey there,

Welcome to the lab. Do you like free stuff? Well, I get pretty excited when I am willing to pay for something and then I find it for free.  In this weeks post I am going to share two free software programs that I am pretty enthusiastic  about.

The first one is Paint.net. I am not a graphic artist or any thing but I do have some experience with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Coreldraw and they are most decidedly not free. As with most things you get what you pay for but if you are new to photo editing Paint is a great Free place to start.

In this video I cover how to use some of the tools in the Paint software to demonstrate how to make a bleach-able t-shirt design from a photograph. Warning it is a long video. 🙂 If you just want to see the t-shirts that I made from this art you can scroll to the bottom of this post. If you want to learn about some of the things you can do with this software then push play.

But as excited as I am about the Paint software I am even a little more excited about I-Spring Free Cam. It is the software that allowed me to make this video showing the computer screen as I was working in the paint software. Now you may not have a use for such software or maybe you do. If you have ever thought about making a video tutorial on how to use your computer or any computer software, or you want to record a video chat, then I Spring Free Cam is a pretty simple and Free place to start. I was a little intimidated to download and learn this new software when I started. I didn’t like not knowing if it would do what I wanted. I had already been disappointed once. But sometimes we have to do some trial and error.  And I have to say the learning curve for this software wasn’t too steep. To be honest I don’t remember all of the specifics that lead me to choose this software over some of the others that I found. But here are two important things I do remember.

1 – The I Spring Free Cam software does not have a recording time limit. One of the other ones I looked at limited you to 10 mins of video at a time.

2 – There are a lot of videos and/or blog posts out there that show how to use software that is already on your computer if you have windows 10. You can use this software to record but it does not show/record any drop down menues or secondary windows such as tool bars etc, so for me it is not a suitable option for on screen tutorials.

One other thing to note is that I-Spring does have paid versions and other software so make sure you are downing loading the “I Spring Free Cam” software.

Alright enough of the software stuff here are the

Here is the photo made into artwork.

And then into two shirts.

And of course two more shirt cuz I have more than one dog. 🙂

Thanks for stopping by.

Happy Learning, Creating and as always Upcycling,