Photorealistic illustrations

Both Eric and I read BoingBoing on a regular basis. It's a "directory of wonderful things" aka a mishmash of cool things on the interweb, design stuff, tech stuff, and generally a really good daily read.

Recently they featured this link to The World's Most Photorealistic Vector Art. It's truly amazing to me that someone has this much control over gradients in Illustrator.


This isn't a photo of Keira Knightley, but rather an illustration done by Paul Bush.

This one's an illustration by Halim Ghodbane:



Check out the gallery of other vector illustrations at the bottom of the post. Make sure to hit the "Outline" button to see the mesh used for the gradients. Wow.