I decided to make a dragon after working on a painting of a dragon. I thought about a dragon I had seen in a Mardi Gras parade one year when I visited my grandparents, and I wanted to create something 3 dimensional. I had never done paper mache before and was excited to try something new. I worked on it for about an hour a week for six weeks. The shape just kind of came together as I was working on it. I wanted to use a lot of recycled materials, so I would dig through our recycle bin to get newspaper, cardboard, and bigger cans to build up the inside. One day my mom was opening a package, and I saw some packing and knew it was what I needed for the scales. The hardest part of making my dragon was stretching and shaping the scales over and over to get them right. My favorite part of it is the tongue, because it's flexible and changes his look when you move it in a different direction. I came up with the title because I was born in the Year of the Dragon, 2012.