In this paper we consider the lossy compression of a binary symmetric source. We present a scheme that provides a low complexity lossy compressor with near optimal empirical performance. The proposed scheme is based on b-reduced ultra-sparse LDPC codes over GF(q). Encoding is performed by the Reinforced Belief Propagation algorithm, a variant of Belief Propagation. The computational complexity at the encoder is O(<d>.n.q.log q), where <d> is the average degree of the check nodes. For our code ensemble, decoding can be performed iteratively following the inverse steps of the leaf removal algorithm. For a sparse parity-check matrix the number of needed operations is O(n).