snails and cicadas

Drawing of insects from an Australian garden, given to me by friends and family - a snail and cicada
Watercolour pencil in Moleskine Sketchbook

I had always called both of these cicadas and so when I was drawing these I had to actually find out what they were. I was right . They ARE both cicadas. The shell is what the nymph discards when it emerges from living underground.. I remember them being on paperbark trees. At high school we used to put them on our jumpers  like a  brooch.

This particular cicada is a Bladder Cicada. Not the nicest of names, but definitely the prettiest cicada. It ia the less ïnsect-looking" cicada I think

Cicadas are well known for their song/drone. It happens in summer around dusk. The noise is so loud that we always had to close the windows on those hot Queensland summer nights toblock the noise.
The male Bladder Cicadas have the greatly enlarged abdomen, largely hollow. This is the resonating chamber to amplify the loudness of their songs. Females are smaller in size and relatively smaller abdomen.


and here is the snail......

insects and beetles

For Christmas I was given a box of feathers, leaves, a nest, seed pods and a few beetles. In the last few days I have finally put aside time to draw some of them (in watercolour pencil in my Moleskine watercolour sketchbook) .

Unfortunately I am unable to provide very much technical information about them.I can tell you they were collected in Toowoomba, Queensland,Australia, probably along suburban footpaths, waterbird habitat or my mothers backyard !

This top page is what I always called a Stag Beetle. I have found out they are part of Rhinocerous Beetle family which covers many similar looking beetles with varying degrees of spiky and spiny features.




This second page has a few mysterious small black and brown insects. I know the highly un-technical name of the "click beetle" (middle left) which (when we were children) we used to put our finger on their back they would click and jump . The green cicada is also a familiar insect . Maybe the one above it is a Christmas beetle ???

I really enjoyed drawing ( or is it painting?) these. I also wanted to write all over it with notes. I have kept most of the beetles and bugs to draw again another day....

Periodical Cicadas...

Sometimes called 17-year cicadas, or erroneously "locusts"--they're back, in my area, announcing their presence with a different, whirring, repeated mechanical-sounding note.  Some broods are really every 13 years, so not sure about the time lapse, but they ARE interestng, and different from our usual annual cicadas.  I'm finding their amber-colored shed "skins" all over the place...

 Here's the new kid in town with one of last year's Dog Day (annual) Cicadas...)

I had to sketch them in my journal with their relative sizes!  I haven't been able to catch one emerging, but that's always fun to watch, seeing them change from pale, page green to full color...

Gotta love those beady red eyes!

For more information on these fascinating critters, check HERE.

Bladder cicada - Alissa Duke

Bladder cicada

Bladder cicada (Cystosoma saundersii )

I found this insect on the lawn . It must have just died as the skin was still soft and green. I drew it that night and by the next morning the colours had faded and the skin was harder.

Bladder cicadas are up to 5cm long, males have a large, hollow abdomen, which acts as an echo chamber for a call that lasts up to half-an-hour. Males of this common cicada species produce a distinctive, deep, frog-like sound from dusk to early evening. This Bladder cicadas are common garden residents in north, central and south-east Queensland - I was visiting Toowoomba in SE Qld for Christmas. We had to close the windows to drown out the noise of the cicadas on a few evenings. a traditional part of my Australian Christmas ! Thank goodness the weather was not really hot (as it usually is at Christmas)

Cicada

I finally made time for another insect!

Cicadas are just fascinating to me... I watched one emerge from its shell the other day and that was amazing. This is not that one. I couldn't collect it after it had worked so hard getting out of that shell and inflating (is that the right word?) its wings. I found this one drowned in the dog pool.

Ink & watercolor in the watercolour Moleskine.

Drawing is calming...

I find that my stress levels drop dramatically if I take the time to draw carefully from nature...

I've always loved cicadas--their sounds, their abandoned amber husks, the lacy wings of the adults. This page even has a time-lapse video of an emergent cicada--and this one tells some interesting facts about the noisy summer creature.