This is the story of a weekend project which turned into a months long challenge. After coming across a photorealistic painting made entirely out of strings, I wanted to create one on my own. But how? I decided to reverse engineer the algorithm that computes which strings to stretch and in which order. In this talk, I will show how I created a Python algorithm that produces a beautiful work of art. I will cover topics such as greedy algorithms, image processing, color spaces, performance optimization and many other challenges that I encountered while cracking the algorithm. And of course, I'll show the resulting work of art!