We have outlined an approach to special-purpose language design and implementation using the well-established technology of functional programming languages. Our recommendation is to consider carefully the type of primitive values peculiar to the domain, and embed this type in an existing functional language, such as Standard ML or Haskell. We illustrated this process with respect to FPIC, a language for picture-drawing inspired by the language PIC, and illustrated some of its benefits. FPIC is not perfect, but we would argue that the quality-to-cost-of-development ratio is very high.