Cuttlelola GO!

At my retreat, as you know, we all got bitten by the Pokemon Go! bug HARD. It's SUCH a fun game, and I love that suddenly I now see - wait for it - LIVE HUMAN CHILDREN OUTSIDE.

Prior to this game, it would have been impossible to detect the presence of any children within a ten mile radius of my house. Since the game launched, I have discovered that my neighborhood does, in fact, have some live young in it, and they have now discovered the OUTDOORS.

It's so strange to me that kids here never go outside, and so different from my childhood experience. I worry about their imaginations and their vitamin D levels and their lack of contact with animals. Our days were filled with lizards and snakes and ants and all manner of wildlife. I could have done without the hot water we drank from the hose, but other than that, pretty much all we knew as kids was outside, and it was delightful. I still don't consider a day to be well spent if I haven't had a walk.

On my daily walks I NEVER saw kids and teens on the trails - now the trails are full of the Pokemon hunters - and I love it.

Bravo, Nintendo. The perfect blend of today's technology and the real world. Someone in that company has a lot of soul, a lot of brains, and now, a LOT of money.

Before you get the urge to fun-squash by coming up with a story about how someone fell off a cliff playing Pokemon - stifle yourself. There were stupid people prior to this game. Shoot - I see a woman on Mopac - our expressway - SEVERAL times a week, eating soup while she drives. Just like Facebook and beer don't make you stupid, Pokemon doesn't make you stupid. These people were stupid before they downloaded the app. Now they're just famous and stupid.

You know what's not stupid? Any new technology that brings us together and gives us common interests - across every sort of cultural or temporal divide there is. That is truly the wonder and value of things like this game. People who are quick to write off or criticize these unifying fads, whether serious or silly, are missing the opportunity to find joy in unexpected places, and I think everyone can agree that the world could do with a bit more joy and wonder. 

So try looking for Pikachu and just see if you don't find a little more.

Speaking of technology - I am in love with my newest toy - an early birthday present I bought for myself, along with an art journaling class that I'm LOVING. More on that one later.

But the toy is the Cuttlelola Dots pen. It's basically an electric pointillism machine! And I LOVE stippling/pointillism, but on large projects it can be time consuming and a bit fatiguing.

So I was THRILLED to run across this little wonder and it jumped instantly into my cart. I tried it out for the very first time on this card and filmed the process, so you will see in the video how easy it is to use right out of the box. Check out this stippled version of a rose I did with it.

It's just a thicker pen body, with a little lithium battery inside that powers the stippling motion of the pen. Incredible! Just press the little button (mine is blue, not red), and you're off to the races!

I used the ArtOGraph light box and an image stamped from Rose Wonder to trace the image with the Dots Pen. To finish it off, I used the Hero Arts prayers die for the sentiment for a friend who lost her mother recently.

SO easy and fun and it just took a few minutes - it would have taken me forever manually. When I showed the etched and Zentangled Blended Bloom samples at Convention a few years ago, I had done a stippled version, and just had to show the finished card because it took so long to do by hand. You can see the video on those samples here, and here is my video showing my first time with the Cuttlelola.

I hope you enjoy that - this is quickly becoming an obsession.

So go outside with what's left of the weekend and meet your fellow Pokemon Players. Enjoy the little things. Life is too short to be a fun squasher!

Loveyameanitbye.