How do you make a picture made up of little objects in Illustrator or Photoshop?

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a384/djsniffles2003/sos1977.jpg





In this picture, there is the portrait of the ';Son of Sam'; but if you take a closer look, the picture is made up of little guns and bones.





How is this done?How do you make a picture made up of little objects in Illustrator or Photoshop?
Photoshop has limitations when it comes to layers. You need lots of memory just to open hundreds of layers. But the technique shown is more towards using custom brushes.





The artist is using customized brushes and the object variates to get the effects and was painted manually.





That is how the bones and the guns are mixing. I can't image of using millions of layers because Photoshop does not have a limitation, but it became limited only when the resources (computer, speed, memory, disk space) limited.





My wild guess, using customized brushes.





Ht2脴How do you make a picture made up of little objects in Illustrator or Photoshop?
Illustrator would be best for this. You'd have a gazillion layers in Photoshop. Just make the object and copy and paste them over a locked photo. Unlock and delete the photo and wha-lah.