How do you create pictures like this?

The idea may have sprung from printers printing color swatches of the inks used in the bleed of a print, or it may have just been some creative compulsion by a design student, but the idea is not new.

It's been years and years since I've used Gimp, but remember it being nearly as full-featured as Photoshop at the time, and so should be quite capable of adding blocks of color to an image. You would want to start by adjusting your canvas size, so you have blank space to put your colors in, then you could use the marquee tool to select an area you want to color, use the eyedropper tool to pick a color out of the photograph, then the paintbucket tool to dump that color into the area you selected.

select your marquee tool again, but don't click anything... use your arrow keys to move the selection you previously made to where you want the next block of color. eyedropper... paintbucket... etc.

Have you ever ever long gone into one of those cool technology shops? The place there's a clock that has a stick on the high and it moves backward and forward rather really quick. And you'll discover the time on the clock because since the stick is relocating rapid it creates a kind of "history" for the time to be seen. Discover on-line how they try this and possibly it's going to aid create an image in your fan.