Joozey, what you described reminds me of any type art:

Try to draw a realistic image and just get one tiny aspect of it wrong (some wrong color, a missing shadow), people will say "ah, that looks weird".
Draw like Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny or even Picasso, and you get famous.

There was an article on Beowulf I read. Dunno, might've been posted here. Talked about something similar as well: If you get real close to photorealism, but you're not quite there, it looks more spooky than real...