This chapter investigates how visual art students describe images of their own creative work in academic writing. Drawing on a corpus of 60 image descriptions, it identifies the rhetorical functions that shape these texts and examines how they are sequenced to convey conceptual intent, process detail, and critical reflection. To achieve this, a functional coding scheme was developed to classify individual clauses and sentences into one of 17 rhetorical functions, grouped into four overarching categories: Conceptual, Descriptive, Practice, and Referential Commentary. The findings reveal consistent rhetorical patterns—most notably the co-occurrence of conceptual explanation, visual anchoring, and process elaboration—indicating that students use image descriptions to position their work within broader creative inquiries. Raising awareness of these strategies may help students produce more coherent and critically engaged academic writing about their artistic practice. The chapter concludes by proposing a role for AI in teaching rhetorical functions, particularly in supporting students with lexical choice and rhetorical awareness.