Abstract Chicago Acrylic Painting: Bringing out Great Memories of the Windy City

This past week-end I decided to make an attempt at an abstract painting since I've watched several videos on abstract and many of them were of cityscapes.

Chicago is where I consider myself partly from, it's where I essentially became an adult and built a nice career for myself. There are so many great things about Chicago and I painted this scene from mostly my memory of this particular view. The cool thing about abstract (or at least how I, a novice artist) interpret it, is that the painting shouldn't exactly match, have uniqueness and not be realistic.

So this won't match any real scene but what I tried to capture were some icons so my Chicago friends would recognize it for one, but it also brings back memories for me as well. Such as, the main bridge at the bottom, that's the Well's street bridge that feeds into the loop. I used to bike everywhere and I took this bridge on my way to work every morning for about the first 4 years I lived there.

Using a Pallet Knife

I haven't ever painted with a pallet knife but I thought it looked cool so I wanted to try it out on the buildings. Other artists online make it look really easy but it wasn't nearly as easy as I thought.

The thing with abstract paintings too is that it's more difficult to clean up mistakes and you have to move quickly because in this painting I wanted to blend and create texture with the buildings.

I initially thought I wasn't going to do much more than use a pallet knife, but then I looked back at this part and realized it needed more.

Playing Around

In this part I really just went on my own, I can't tell you what techniques I applied but thought the buildings needed shadow and more colors. So I kind of just went rogue here and tried to make it more colorful, etc. As I was going I started to find some consistency in what I was doing and apply it throughout the painting.

Abstract Chicago

This is the final version I landed on. I could have probably kept going but I didn't want to overdo it and I was pretty happy with the result. I could have made the water look more trippy but I kind of like how the water and the sky are mostly just one color while the buildings are more textured.

From Far Away

The cool thing about this painting is that it looks much better when viewing from afar. I also painted it on a smaller canvas so it has that type of feel even more.

This way it looks a lot better! I'm not really a trained artist so I am just going off what I think.

Abstract was definitely harder than I thought and I don't know if I'll keep doing these. I may come back to them but I'm going to continue to do realistic landscapes because I enjoy doing them more. They are much more calming and I think more people like my family will appreciate them.

Abstract requires more techniques I'd like to improve so that later when I'm ready I can give extra flavor to them.

Thanks for checking out my art!

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Check Out My Other Artwork

Acrylic Painting of a Winter Holiday Scene
Sunset at the Beach: First Landscape Attempt
Darth Vader Painting - May the force be with you...

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