Every artist has a way of working that's distinctly theirs. Mine is what I call the Chill-and-Glow Technique. And once I explain it, you'll start seeing it in every piece I make.
The Core Principle
The Chill-and-Glow Technique is built on one foundational idea:
Cool backgrounds. Warm foregrounds. Cool shadows. Warm highlights.
This creates a very specific effect: luminosity. That glowing, lit-from-within quality you might have noticed in my work. When your background is cool — teal, sage, dusty blue, muted lavender — and your foreground subjects are warm — blush, gold, rose, warm ivory — those warm elements advance visually. They push toward you. They seem to float off the surface.
Breaking It Down: The Background (Chill)
Goal: Atmospheric, deep, receding.
My go-to cool palette:
- Phthalo Green (Blue Shade) — deep and rich
- Prussian Blue — dramatic depth
- Payne's Grey — grounding neutral
- Cerulean Blue — lighter, sky-like
- Dioxazine Purple — for mystery and depth
How I apply it: Loose, fluid, wet-on-wet. I want the colours to move. I want them to feel like atmosphere, not solid objects.
The Foreground (Glow)
Goal: Luminous, warm, advancing.
My go-to warm palette:
- Quinacridone Magenta — the heart of my pinks
- Cadmium Orange Hue — pure warmth
- Naples Yellow — luminous, buttery
- Raw Sienna — earthy depth
- Metallic Gold — shimmer and highlight
The Shadows (Cool)
Here's where most painters lose me: they add shadows by mixing black into their colour. Don't do this. Black makes things muddy and dead.
Instead, I add shadows by shifting toward cool. A flower petal in shadow gets a touch of Prussian Blue or Dioxazine Purple mixed into its base colour. The shadow reads as dark but it also reads as alive.
The Highlights (Warm)
Highlights are where the light hits. And light — real light, warm light, the light we love — is warm. I mix my highlights with Naples Yellow or a warm white. Sometimes the highlight IS the gold leaf. Real gold, applied with a gilding brush, catches actual light in the room. Nothing replaces it.
Why This Works
The Chill-and-Glow Technique works because it mimics the way we actually experience light in the natural world. Think of a rose at golden hour: the petals catching the warm sunset light, the shadows deep and cool beneath the leaves. That's what this technique recreates on canvas.
Your Turn
If you're a painter reading this, try it on your next piece. Commit to keeping your background cool and your foreground warm. See what happens.
And if you're not a painter but you're now looking at my work differently — noticing the cool shadows, the warm light, the way things seem to glow — then this post did exactly what I wanted it to do.
— Lisa