Well I've been thinking about my "roots" when it comes to art lately and wondering if I should return to them. It seems that the most popular deviations I had were just montages of various brushes and renders I could find and those seem to be the most popular. Over the past year or so I've tried as best I can to move away from that and make my artwork, well, my own. Thats right no brushes! The only exception I had was that I could use stocks from sxc.hu because they were free and I could still consider it my own. However, my friend burnoutpriest and I were making tattoo designs for friends and I, of course, designed mine completely from scratch and worked anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour on it. Burnout kind of messed around with making his from scratch but didn't seem to get anywhere with that. So finally I finish mine and I'm sending it to them and they are critiquing it until we come up with a decent result. However, at the last minute burnout decides to use a brush pack and places a tribal brush under some Gothic text. He sends this to them and immediately they love it and will decide to use that one(or at least they liked it better, I don't know if they are going to use it or not)
Now I know he wasn't trying to one up me or anything like that and I apologize to him if he feels that way (sorry bro you know you are one of the best digital artists out there).
Anyway, the point to this whole story is a such. Should I go back to my roots and use a whole bunch of compiled resources to make digital art, or should I stick to making everything as original as possible. I'm going to leave this up to you, however most will not read this anyway so maybe not. But nonetheless I want your opinions on this matter.