Now Picture to People online branch (the official site) has a very innovative and powerful (highly configurable) artistic vexel renderer based on photos.

Since it's not an obvious tool (at least if you wanna know how to use all of it), I will make a tutorial about it when I have time.

If you have any interest about artistic Computer Graphics, you could like to try the Picture to People artistic vexel renderer in the site (http://www.picturetopeople.org), at the "Art Vexels" section.

There also are an increasing list of Picture to People artistic vexel renderer examples here: http://picturetopeople.blogspot.com.