Shards of the Iconoclast is a painting I made in Zbrush using just its standard paint brushes. I prepared the web version in Photoshop (border + text).
Maybe it almost looks like 3D 
It was partly inspired by the famous Mycenaean Mask of Agamemnon.
Thanks for looking!
RobertT
That’s wonderfully real-looking. Great attention to detail. I had no idea Zbrush could do this. Isn’t it a modeling tool though?
Thanks Rocketman! Zbrush can be used for all sorts of stuff. It’s most famous for being used to model things (ironically, I don’t care much for that part of it yet), and it’s also a powerful texturing and displacement/bumpmap program.
My interest in ZB is really more on the 2D side, with textures, displacement and bump maps, and the possibilities of its unique painting tools. It’s like Deep Paint but way deeper yet, allowing you to really add amazing depth to paintstrokes if you keep going over areas. Texturing strokes can also be done using alpha maps, so you have the options of painting only color or color with depth or just depth, and then with or without texture. Paint can also have its own material settings.
Here I used a standard gold paint material but then went back over with hundreds of various strokes in different areas using a tablet until there was a believable sense of depth. Zbrush, like Painter, has lights that can be virtually situated over a canvas, moved, and tweaked. There are also contrast intensity brushes (like dodge/burn in Photoshop) that can help enhance the sense of depth in an image, and sprayers that allow you to spread color and details over an image.
Lots of possibilities 
RobertT
