Pencil drawing sometimes reminds me of playing the guitar. You can learn a few tricks, and a few fundamentals, fairly quickly. But if you really want to grow and stretch in the use of your pencil, or your guitar, you have to dig in and do things not just for fun.

With this drawing exercise, to keep the images random, I froze the frame a little after I decided to freeze the frame. It was random, but with veto power: if the frozen image was totally uninteresting, I didn’t attempt a drawing.

I’ve done this exercise many times since DVDs became available to the video consumer. I rarely get an image that isn’t either too busy or unfinished-looking. But I almost always get something that makes the image a keeper. In this case, I have a believable wheelbarrow and a stitched baseball that feels like it is occupying three-dimensional space. I also like that the text on the page has both descriptions and a scrap of dialogue from the movie.