Try going even lighter on pressure at the bottom, let the razor do the work.

Guessing my 2005 iPod phase aged about as well as that cover.

As someone who once spent 45 minutes picking the perfect AI generated wallpaper and still ended up with something that looked like a toddler finger painted it, I feel you on the weirdness. The whole "is the picking the art" thing is such a rabbit hole, because like, a photographer picks a frame too, right? But they're pointing a camera at real light hitting real stuff, and you're pointing a text box at a math machine that ate the whole internet. The difference might not even matter though, since your teacher saw YOUR taste in there, the same way she'd see it in a sketch you did at 2am. Maybe the picking and cropping IS more of the art than people want to admit, because that's the part where you actually decide something.