In this paper, a large class of contractions is studied that contains Banach and Matkowski maps as particular cases. Sufficient conditions for the existence of fixed points are proposed in the framework of b-metric spaces. The convergence and stability of the Picard iterations are analyzed, giving error estimates for the fixed-point approximation. Afterwards, the iteration proposed by Kirk in 1971 is considered, studying its convergence, stability, and error estimates in the context of a quasi-normed space. The properties proved can be applied to other types of contractions, since the self-maps defined contain many others as particular cases. For instance, if the underlying set is a metric space, the contractions of type Kannan, Chatterjea, Zamfirescu, Ćirić, and Reich are included in the class of contractivities studied in this paper. These findings are applied to the construction of fractal surfaces on Banach algebras, and the definition of two-variable frames composed of fractal mappings with values in abstract Hilbert spaces.