Imagination, as an essential aspect of human nature, is fundamental to all ways of thinking. However, this powerful faculty is usually overlooked or marginalized in educational research. In the article, I explore imagination as a methodological source for researchers to generate expansive, purposeful, fluid, and developmental knowledge about the subjective realities constructed by individuals as meaning-makers. To do so, I illustrate how I use two variations of painting (i.e. cartoon- and freestyle-painting) to facilitate such an imaginative space for understanding students' meaning-making about intercultural experience. Imagination, as facilitated through the subjective, transformative space of arts methods, can extend the epistemological and methodological possibilities of knowledge for educational research. It provides a post-qualitative methodology which can be particularly useful for enabling conceptually abstract and structurally complex knowledge that may not be expressible or interrogatable in a coherent way through traditional research methods in education.