A New Art Style

In December of 2025, I made a lengthy post about different art styles and recently I came across another style called metal art or repoussé and chasing described as follows:

Repoussé and chasing are two complementary, age-old metalworking techniques that work in tandem to sculpt malleable metal into three-dimensional relief designs. While they are distinct actions, they are almost universally used together on the same piece of metal—one pushes the material out from behind, and the other refines and details it from the front.

Repoussé: Pushing from the Back

The word repoussé is French for "pushed back." In traditional metalwork, an artisan takes a sheet of malleable metal (like copper, bronze, or silver), lays it face-down in a supportive pitch bowl, and uses hammers and rounded tools to beat the design into the metal from the reverse side.

In the context of your astrological art piece, repoussé is responsible for the raised relief elements:

• The structural lines and borders: The concentric circles, house divisions, and straight aspect lines crossing the center are "pushed outward" so they stand proud of the background.

• The glyphs and symbols: The planetary and zodiac symbols appear as three-dimensional, embossed shapes that rise off the surface of the colored sectors.

Chasing: Defining from the Front

Once the general shapes are pushed outward from behind, the metal sheet is flipped over so the artisan can work on the front side. Using specialized chisels, punches, and chasing hammers, the craftsman pushes the metal back down around the raised areas to sharpen them.

In your artwork, chasing is responsible for the definition and surface texture:

• Crisp edges: Chasing tools are used to outline the raised symbols and lines, giving them distinct, sharp boundaries against the background rather than soft, blobby edges.

• Hammered textures: Notice the organic, dimpled texture across the dark central field and within the colored zodiac boxes. In physical metalworking, this is achieved by repeatedly tapping the background metal with a planishing or chasing hammer to compress and texture the surface, making the smooth, raised elements pop by contrast.

Why It is Called an "Effect" Here

In digital art, describing a style as a "repoussé and chasing effect" means digitally simulating the physical physics of this craftsmanship. The rendering engine applies specific visual cues—such as metallic sheen, directional highlights on the top edges of the lines, deep cast shadows beneath the raised glyphs, and a hammered patina in the negative space—to transform a flat, two-dimensional chart into a heavy, tactile, sculptural piece of metalwork.

I applied the effect to an old monochrome photo using this prompt:

Can you apply a repoussé and chasing effect (metal wall art) to the attached image. The rather drab colours can be replaced with more vibrant ones and aethetic details added to clothing and background. Care should be taken to preserve the facial details of the person so that she remains clearly recognisable although liberties can be taken with the hair to create dramatic effect is appropriate. The details of the background are not important and can be replaced. Only the person is important. 

I was pleasantly surprised with the result:

I applied the effect to the person's natal chart and the result was also good. I used this prompt:Can you apply a repoussé and chasing effect (metal wall art) to the attached image. Be careful to preserve the glyphs and straight lines. Do NOT add any additional glyphs or lines.

Pareto Chart

While working my way through a text book on Business Statistics using Excel, I came across reference to a Pareto chart and needed to do a little investigating to find out what it was. Here is the definition from Wikipedia:

A Pareto chart, named after Vilfredo Pareto, is a type of chart that contains both bars and a line graph, where individual values are represented in descending order by bars, and the cumulative total is represented by the line. 

The left vertical axis is the frequency of occurrence, but it can alternatively represent cost or another important unit of measure. The right vertical axis is the cumulative percentage of the total number of occurrences, total cost, or total of the particular unit of measure. Because the reasons are in decreasing order, the cumulative function is a concave function. To take the example below, in order to lower the amount of late arrivals by 78%, it is sufficient to solve the first three issues 

The purpose of the Pareto chart is to highlight the most important among a (typically large) set of factors. In quality control, it often represents the most common sources of defects, the highest occurring type of defect, or the most frequent reasons for customer complaints, and so on. Wilkinson (2006) devised an algorithm for producing statistically based acceptance limits (similar to confidence intervals) for each bar in the Pareto chart.

These charts can be generated by simple spreadsheet programs, such as Apache OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc and Microsoft Excel, visualisation tools such as Tableau Software, specialised statistical software tools, and online quality charts generators. The Pareto chart is one of the seven basic tools of quality control.

The next issue was to check how to generate a Pareto chart in Excel. I thought that there might be a magic button but you have to do it all yourself. Here's what I ended up with:

I did get some help in doing this and here is a link to a very useful website that outlines step-by-step how to create a Pareto chart. There are some excellent tutorials available on this site.