Cicada creativity: Help fill our Brood X art gallery

The cool-looking insects will soon be out in force, although they may not pose for a painting.

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Cicadas have been featured in art for centuries. To mark the arrival of the Brood X 17-year cicadas KidsPost invites you to create original cicada art. A gallery of the art will be published in KidsPost in early June.

With 17-year cicadas about to emerge in the Washington area, KidsPost wants you to embrace this unusual phenomenon. We’re creating a cicada art gallery, and we would like to feature your drawing or painting. An art gallery may seem like a weird idea, but cicadas have been featured for centuries in artwork from Asia — where various species of the insects are common.

Brood X (X means the number 10) is the group of cicadas that will appear this month in the D.C. area and other parts of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. The insects have been waiting underground for almost 17 years, and they deserve more than a few weeks of glory. By July, the adults will be gone, many eaten by birds, squirrels and possibly your dog. Your artwork will help everyone remember these quirky creatures for years to come.

We welcome two-dimensional mediums other than photographs (pencil, paints, pastels, etc.). You could focus on one cicada or a group. Your creation does not have to be realistic, meaning it doesn’t have to look similar to a cicada in a science textbook. It needs to be original — not copied from someone else — and you must be a United States resident ages 6 to 13 to participate. Five participants will be chosen at random to receive a KidsPost T-shirt.

Ask a parent or teacher to upload your art through our form at
wapo.st/kidspost_cicada _art
by May 25. We’ll showcase the drawings in print and on kidspost.com in early June.

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Source: WP