This is called a geometric painting.
What is this type of painting called?
The second one looked like an enlarged paint- by- numbers.
Tonal? Layered? Layered tonal?
Whatever it’s called, it’s a beautiful piece of art.
It reminds me of “solarized” photographs that were popular in the 1970s.
I’d call the first one geometric.
At the very least if you do a google image search for “geometric [subject] art” you’ll find a lot of similar things.
Good, that is what I called it in the OP. 
I need the name for the second one.
Yeah. it does look like a paint by numbers but it is freehand.
Not seeing anything on a google search that looks the same.
Speaking of which, why does nobody make erase-by-numbers art?
“A half hour in Photoshop!”
[Not threadshitting. They look like photographs that have had the background removed and then “smart blurred.”]
Can you link to an example? Google search for “smart blur” turns up nothing similar.
No, but similar. This seems (to me) more like painting something then tearing it up into little scraps and gluing it back together. Hence, I’m stuck on collage or mosaic, neither of which is correct. I knew the style once and you could google the name and get pages of examples.
Let’s call it “Che Guevarazation”!
There was a documentary a few years back about Vermeer’s paintings. It showed how he achieved such lifelike effects by presumably using what was basically a camera obscura approach. This painting reminds me of ones produced in same manner.
When erasing, you use stencils instead:
Amazon.com : scratch art stencils
Click on link. Compare the top cat to the smart- blurred cat below. (I just did this in Photoshop)
Ok, I see what you mean but not what I’m looking for. Thanks a lot for taking the time to do that.
It’s primary features are the limited/reduced color palette, and the resultant ‘banding’.
Oil paintings in theory have an infinite color palette, but in practice most artists deliberately paint with a limited palette. So it’s a characteristic of ‘painter effect’, and you can get pre-set effects like ‘paintum’ that include it. The problem is that most ‘painterly’ effects also include brush strokes or cracking or something as well as the limited color palette, and actively strive to avoid banding.
Reduced color palette is the defining feature of posterization. In post-processing, it’s mostly an unwanted effect (‘banding’). Posters were made with a 3 or 4 or 5 (or 6 or 7) color process, depending on how much you were willing to pay. Unfortunately, almost all the ‘posterization’ examples you see are 3 or 4 primary colors. Also, a lot of posterization includes some degree of sharpening or vectorization, which tends to reduce the fine lines you see in your example.
Still, for lack of better knowledge, I’d call it ‘painter effect’ and ‘posterization’: it’s just that most examples are of something different.
In ‘art’ terms, I think it’s a subset of ‘pop art’, but again, not a subset I’ve seen named.
It’s definitely “posterized,” and it’s easy to do in a program
like Adobe Illustrator:
Original:
“Live trace,” 6 colors in Adobe Illustrator:
(Open the image in a new window to see the best effect).