Ok, when I first saw the works of this guy (Yukio Miyamoto) I was struggling to keep my jaw from falling on the floor. I mean... these works are really a huge step ahead, in means of photo-realism. Then I must confess that really crossed my mind to uninstall Illustrator and become a farmer maybe :P
But the time passed, I did grow as a designer (at least I would like to believe so), learned a few tips and tricks and finally realised that it is not impossible to achieve such level of detail on illustrations, without spending of course millions of hours in front of a computer monitor.
So, I plan to post a little tutorial regarding this technique, but meanwhile enjoy the Master himself...
