She can’t draw the gourd well (drawing is hard) so she wads the paper into the shape of the gourd (making shapes is easy).
What’s the pencil in the “gourd” for?
To represent the wine bottle?
Oh that works (from one particular angle).
Looks like a scorpion. I think it’s a commentary on the TA.
To keep it from unraveling she used the pencil as a make-shift pin?
It’s a non-representational piece of art made with locally-sourced materials. If it doesn’t move you to tears, you are a philistine who doesn’t understand ART.
Red-haired woman is as bad at remembering names and faces as I am, if she thinks the other person in panel 4 is the same as the one in panel 1.
This one probably requires the previous couple of strips. The professor is super-pretentious and had been spouting a lot of nonsense, which Tara here was mocking. Luann is the TA for the class and called her out on it, whereupon Tara challenged Luann about the meaning of some of the pretentious statements. Tara’s art piece here was as much a mocking response to all of that as it is anything else. And of course the professor loves it.
Comics I Don't Understand 
She can’t draw the gourd well (drawing is hard) so she wads the paper into the shape of the gourd (making shapes is easy).
What’s the pencil in the “gourd” for?
To represent the wine bottle?
Oh that works (from one particular angle).
Looks like a scorpion. I think it’s a commentary on the TA.
To keep it from unraveling she used the pencil as a make-shift pin?
It’s a non-representational piece of art made with locally-sourced materials. If it doesn’t move you to tears, you are a philistine who doesn’t understand ART.
Red-haired woman is as bad at remembering names and faces as I am, if she thinks the other person in panel 4 is the same as the one in panel 1.
This one probably requires the previous couple of strips. The professor is super-pretentious and had been spouting a lot of nonsense, which Tara here was mocking. Luann is the TA for the class and called her out on it, whereupon Tara challenged Luann about the meaning of some of the pretentious statements. Tara’s art piece here was as much a mocking response to all of that as it is anything else. And of course the professor loves it.
She got an A+ on it this morning.