Photo Retouching: Minding your "X's" and "M's"

Recently, I got a call to see if I could do something for a client. They needed the "XM" taken out of the background of a portrait to send to another publication. They needed it ASAP, so I gave myself 30 minutes to see if I could complete the task. I did and they were very pleased with the end product.
As you can see from the image, there wasn't much space for me to use the clone brush to fabricate the background, so I decided to create the wall from scratch using lines and the gradient tool.

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