To produce her "Testing" paintings, Chartier applies her own formulas of inks, stains, and dyes often made from non-art materials such as furniture stains or fabric dyes, onto gessoed panels in a predetermined composition. She relies on chance and the unpredictability of her materials “to do things paint can't do – change, shift, and migrate through other layers of paint, or separate into component parts with differing properties.” Scientific images inspire the visual compositions of her paintings in which the colors “bleed and seep in unexpected ways”. Chartier learned about gel electrophoresis from coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial. She began adding illustrations of this scientific laboratory process to her growing scrapbook of biology images: pictures of mold, cells, and DNA tests which became references for her organic compositions. Chartier has stated, “I'm using the creative processes in both painting and science as metaphors for one another: for curiosity and exploring and documenting the natural world with a sense of wonder.”