Inspiration: Wall painting

Another one in the Inspiration series. As some of you may know, I've been to Prague over the weekend, and the first thing someone asked was, will you make a Prague-based puzzle? I thought about it for a few minutes and figured I'd have to include the architecture somehow.

I want this to be a sort of inspiration to others thinking about how they can create their own puzzle. So this was my workflow:

Idea: Make a puzzle inspired by the architecture in Prague.

Concept: Take a vacation photo and hide a code in the paintings on the wall.

Visualization: What I needed to do was first to find a font that feels like it would fit the object. So I took one of my flowery fonts that felt a bit more decorative. Next I sampled the already existing writing for colour and skewed the text and rotated it to match the background to make it fit in more. Because of the low quality of a camera photo I also had to add some blur, grain and minor effects to make it look less perfect. It's always important when you are hiding a text in an image to compare your text with already existing elements and try to recreate the conditions of it. Most of the time people forget to make their added items look crappier. If you want something to blend in, a small amount of grain and blur is almost always required.

Reward: Surfingers X 2. Level 2. And a train, but you don't require to solve this puzzle to get to that one, but it's here anyway ;)

Ask me anything about creating this or any puzzle. I will freely offer advice and hints. Want to know something about how to work in photoshop that's relevant to this, just ask! One thing I will not do though is post the actual solution.

View attached image.