Thanks guys, that wasn't bad at all. It looks like the mask can't be the alpha of the diffuse but its own texture file; that's what was tripping me up. Thanks
you lerp between a solid color and your "regular" diffuse texture with the mask as... the mask :D the better your mask is the nicer the solid color blends into your texture. it's pretty much just 4 nodes connected together. 2 texture samples, a constant3 vector and the lerp node.