And so ends spring break (suppress your disappointment)

ah, yes. brace yourselves for another grueling two and a half months of school. honestly, I don't think I've ever been so relieved with the arrival of spring break. so, as usual, at the beginning I had an entire mental list of things I was going to do to get myself organized. and, as usual, I completed about a twelth of them. that would be vacuuming, and completing homework. foremost, I wanted to clean out my room and my backpack,  which unfortunately gets quite heavy as it is weighed down by the accumulated weight of last semester's papers. when my room gets too messy, I can't think. anyways, I did just finish both my concentration pieces for this month, which is a great relief. I love our art class. I'll miss it come summer. Okay, here are the concentration pieces: (feedback would be greatly appreciated)

I struggled quite a bit with this top piece. Well, actually, I had quite a bit of fun. The rocks were all done with a palette knife, which gives nice texture--I just had a hard time making them look like rocks. I haven't done much palette knife work in the past. Maybe just a few spots here and there in some of my past paintings. It's a really different style than what I'm used to, but I absolutely love using the palette knife.

This was the first piece I finished, and throughout the entire time I worked on it, I felt like something just wasn't right. It wasn't until I was cleaning off my palette that I realized that I had put that one bush right smack in the center of the painting, vertically speaking. Maybe sometime I'll crop it. But right now, I'm sort of sick of looking at it.