This is a painting. Yes, a painting. By hand. With paint and brushes.
“Bus with Reflection”
I just watched a PBS show bout the artist, Richard Estes.
Amazing work
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He must have a well-developed ability to visualize light and how it travels. There are few people today who can paint reflections to the point where it would not look all that different if you rendered the same scene in 3D using a pathtracer (ie. the painted version perhaps being a little less refined, but with all of the shapes in the right places).
He takes photographs, and copies them. He’s been doing it since the 1960’s.
The most impressive part of all is that most of hyper realistic paintings need about 3 months full-time to be completed (even more).