Environment art style exploration

Recently I have been trying to figure what artstyle the game should have, how stylised it should be and what type of stylisation works best with the puzzles in the game.

James showed me some art from the game The Witness where they used photographs and then painted on top of them to simplify them and remove detail, to try and come up with a unique stylised environment. Here's a link to the page which I used for reference: http://www.artofluis.com/3d-work/the-art-of-the-witness/discarded-fun/

I then went onto doing this myself with images that I had collected for reference:

This was an interesting process and good to experiment with. I feel like it has helped me establish some things that I do want and others that I don't but not helped me find a style 100%. That's why I went onto look at Horizon Zero Dawn and deconstruct some of the things I like in their environments. Obviously our game look completely different but I was mainly interested in how they incorporated key colours, patters, designs and geometric shapes.

I also found an artist that I loved the style of and wanted to replicate in our game; Slawek Fedorczuk. Their work can be found here: http://www.iamag.co/features/the-art-of-slawek-fedorczuk/

After looking at a couple ideas I moved onto working on photobashes/paintovers of the modular pieces. I did a clown render and shadow render of the props and then took them into Photoshop separated the layers and began designing look of the game. Here are a couple iterations I have gone through so far: