Doncaster Reptile Expo - Scaly New Inspiration?

Over the weekend I attended the Doncaster reptile expo in the hopes of finding my hognose a colour morph mate for the future as well searching for some new inspiration for creature art in the future.

The day started off well with a free raffle where our entry tags each had their own serial numbers on that we could check with a selection of reptile related prizes. One of which was a heat mat which I won, happy days!
After checking at the raffle stall for any more prizes we went into the main hall to witness thousands of different snakes, reptiles and insects being sold on individual stalls. Originally I was on the hunt for the Hognose stall and nothing else but I soon found myself getting wrapped up in the many different varieties of animals that were on sale and it began to give me new inspirations for creature concept art.

From the whole day my two favourite creatures that I saw were the hognose morphs which I already had a natural interest in related to the breeding program I'm making for them and also the Mantid stall.
The Mantid stall had a vast variety of different breeds of stick insect and praying mantis, my favourite being an adult female Dead Leaf Mantis which found its way onto my hand and happily sat with me as I browsed the rest of the stock.

 

 

The sheer amount of creatures around the arena almost overloaded my mind with concept ideas, so much so that I eventually began thinking of horrific Mantis-Snake hybrids to create into concept art which I have still yet to do.

The day all in all was a brilliant experience and I will be sure to go to more exotic animal expos in the future to further my imagination and ideas for newer, freakier concept art.