Edit to note that this post is post dated, as I try to catch up and share things that happened in 2024, a heartbreaking year
For years there has been this graphic going around sharing a map of all of the emerging cidada broods around the midwest and eastcoast. I didn’t realize, but these 13, or 17, etc. year cicada broods are a completely different cicada than the ones we have normally every year. Instead of being all green, cute and chonky, they are black with RED EYES! 2024 is finally our year, and as we waited with anticipation for their emergence, I decided to make a coloring book page for our Goat Skep event.
Picture of the coloring book page set up at the Art Skep Spring Fling, with market attendee Lee and their coloring book page.
One of our attendees (Golden Hour Bookstore, and previous vendors at a Skep event) messaged me and asked if she could use the coloring book pages for an event at the Sycamore Public Library. I took that invitation as an opportunity to expand it into a whole coloring book, and invited fellow Art Skep member Kyle White to draw some pages with me.
We ended up making an 8 page coloring book, that we offered as a free downloadable pdf.
It was a hit! We hadn’t anticipated that, but people were excited about the cicadas. The best part really was hearing about other people’s experiences and people showing us their colored in pages. People reported that their children who might normally find a “plague” of cicadas scary, were easily introduced to the bugs through the coloring book, and were actually excited and happy when they saw them in real life.
As luck would have it, our DeKalb Bubble™ had almost no cicadas, but if you drove 15 minutes out of town there were plenty. Our family took a trip to Russel Woods in Genoa, IL and it was filled with cicadas! As we were driving north, we passed a grove of trees and through our closed car windows we could hear the song of the cicadas and I got so excited. It truly was the year of the cicadas.
Left – A cicada sculpture that Jill from Tin Shed Farm painted and had on display at the Goat Skep/Spring Fling. Right – My sister and niece coloring in their coloring book pages.
You can still download the free downloadable pdf here.
Let me know if you have downloaded and colored in your book. I started out with a bang, very purposefully coloring in a copy myself, and then at some point I misplaced it. It wasn’t until well after the cicadas were gone that I found it again.
I see there are broods emerging in 2025 in Kentucky and Tennessee, perhaps I should update the 2024 date on the book and do a re-release.
