Wow. To a newbie at shaders, that's one hell of a shader. Thanks a lot for everything.

I do have a few questions though. 1. Where do you come up with the swatches? I have never seen "color 1" swatch or "file_2D." Where are you coming up with these things? Also, it looks like the finished product is a yellow and blue checker texture that is transparent. Why wouldn't you just create a checker, change the transparency, then modify color 1 and 2. That could all be done without creating swatch and after swatch it seems. You see, what I want, is for color one to be tranparent and color two to be solid. If you create a sphere, r-click it, go to Materials>assign new material>phonge, click the checker box next to "color", assign a checker texture to it, then open the "color" tab in the window that pops up, You can see color one and two. I want one to stay solid black and the other to be transparent. Yours looks like the whole thing is slightly transparent.