The Puzzle

This image is a challenge for the smart and playful collectors! If someone buys this art and cracks the hidden code, he will get for almost free any other artwork of mine of his choice (except for those which are a collaboration with another artist).

Here are some hints to solve the puzzle :

There are three main steps :

• The first step is about black, white, bytes, and characters. It must lead you to an encoded string of characters.
• The second step is about decoding this string, and you will need the password "number41". The decoding must be used with the Simple Crypt module of Python.
• The third step will then be explained.

Everybody's free to play and send me the solution on Twitter, but only the owner of this piece will get the reward. Will you have the skills and the patience??There is no time limit to solve the puzzle, and you can get helped.