In 2012 I wanted to improve my illustrator skills so I came up for a challange for myself. As I love vector stuff (because you can size it up without losing quality) I thought of making something realistic. I always hate those small images, consisting out of pixels, that you can't scale up, and are most of the time useless. That time I was working on another project and needed this picture (it's a figure skating boot) for my skating catalogue. This was the inspiring picture that I wanted to make in illustrator. I love the result, but the big negative thing is that it took me a lot of time! I think I spend about 4-6 hours on one view. Nowadays you'll be better off by taking some HD images i guess.