I've asked White Rabbit about "Dr. Mabuse" because I found the text "Dr. Mab" in the image (border, in the background of the flames).
could you please explain how did you find that?
Sure. I create a layer filled with red and set blending mode to "color".
It should work in photoshop and krita (used latest beta) (did not try in gimp because I am not comfortable with the ui).
Now the background of the flames should become some hardly readable text. She really has a scrawl.
You have to rotate/mirror to get something readable on some sides. Additionally you can use curve, level, hue, saturation filters to enhance readability.
Some subjective interpretation of the texts:
N 1984 Dr. Mab....WASABI (might also say Dr. Mar)
CSI 6 E18 At 16 Sec (I mentioned this before. Not sure about the last part)
BRA BRAG Sahara 197 AMERA (totally not sure)
Ace....
Also the ribbons of the key seem to contain a number. See the image:
https://i.imgur.com/1hvEIex.png (14722?)
Edit:
Some other thoughts:
The twitter profile picture of coin_artist could be a hint:
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/915914534430363648/fxPVth9e_400x400.jpgThe image has the red glasses I found in the CSI episode. It has spades (leafs could be spades).
Edit2:
Please use extended ASCII (e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437) for your decryption tests. I have a feeling it might be useful and it doesn't hurt.
Edit 3:
You can find many symbols/numbers/texts but as others have mentioned already it is hard to say what is real/important or just a side effect of the painting style.
Thank you for sharing, Steganography is the most important element in this puzzle (more than cryptography and complicated calculations), the problem with those characters and symbols is that they are highly subjective which means that you can see something that the others can't see or see it in a different way and vise versa.
if you don't put a circle or mark on what you see it's impossible for us to see it.
i can't see for example that number (14722?) in your posted image.
could you please upload an image and put a circle or mark on where you found that (N 1984 Dr. Mab....WASABI).
i did a color analysis for more than 10 colors and the most interesting is the black color but i didn't see something like your texts (there are just symbols)
for the letters i don't know how you interpret it as the only thing that i see is those black
symbols under the flames... see here for example:
https://imgur.com/a/FcMKCi don't know what do you mean by using ASCII ,do you mean that we can translate some symbols using ASCII... here is an example: (how we can read this)
https://imgur.com/a/YurM0There is a < symbol and Y letter in bold blue between dove chest and phoenix.
have you noticed that there is a heart shape on the phoenix head? (not mentioned before)
https://imgur.com/a/yy5ZSdo you see that there are letters in the mirrors? with laughing clown face in the key mirror?
https://imgur.com/a/7tKqmhttps://imgur.com/a/5OywOin the second mirror i see (eej5)
https://imgur.com/a/MNw2Kif you put that in Google one of the result is a minecraft skin for a player who played only like one hour and visited 3 servers
https://minecraft-statistic.net/en/player/eej5.htmlhttps://minecraft-statistic.net/en/player/eej5/servers/i can't check them as i don't have the Minecraft Pc version, but even if there is nothing in those servers i still highly believe that there is some kind of external work in this puzzle (external files, minecraft server, other sites to deal with)
Look at the previous puzzles there were external files and servers to deal with, that way the puzzle becomes more interesting and takes additional time and engages the team work more and more.
another reason is that we have many symbols and characters scattered all over the painting that can be interpreted in some words then we could search for it in Google (ea oem 011 was an example)
