Getting so you can't go for a walk without someone somewhere starting something... How I did it, for the bored, curious, or those seeking other tips and tricks: The model and the ground plane are easy enough: find an angle and pose you like and render away, but mind how you pose the model so you can match it up with the dragon later. (I didn't quite get it, so I'm pointing it out to spare you my mistake.) The dragon layer was confusing as hell for a moment. I kept trying to create an actual shadow in-scene by putting a light source behind the dragon. After raising my blood pressure and accomplishing nothing, I just rendered the dragon solo as a .png* and brought it to Gimp to play Frankenstein with it. I kept it as one layer and clicked on the background using "Select>By Color" then inverted the selection to select the dragon in its entirety, regardless of color (otherwise I'd have been forced to select every individual color on the damn thing. No thanks!) I painted over the dragon in solid black and brought in the model and ground as another layer. I had to move the dragon layer about to make sure it was as close to the model's line of sight as possible while still getting as much of the silhouette in as possible. There are likely a thousand other tips out there to achieve the same effect and some may be even easier, but there's my contribution, and now you have another trick at your disposal. *I default to .png every time because it supports multiple layers, unlike .jpg, a helpful tip for those just starting out. With .png (or .tiff, if I recall) you can render with neutral backgrounds that greatly eases headaches in making layered images, like in Gimp or Photoshop postwork.