The author's fifth-graders are usually easy to motivate, especially with an assignment as exciting as dragons and mythical beasts! Since many of the author's projects are "typical" subjects such as flowers, animals, still life and so on, the idea of creating mythical creatures really caused a stir in her classroom. In this article, the author describes an art project designed for upper-elementary students to create a contour drawing of a dragon or other mythical beast, show detail and movement, render the beast with colored media, blend several colors to show form and texture, cut out the creature, and choose a realistic background and place the creature on it. The project could easily lend itself to pen patterns, oil pastels, black-and-white shading and a variety of other techniques.