As long as your idea is original, so is your art. Period. It doesn’t matter if you used a grid to draw from a photograph or if you drew from life. It doesn’t matter if you’ve drawn realistically or if you’ve taken great freedom with your expression, the thing you create is art if the idea for it originated in your own head. If the idea didn’t come from your own mind, then you’ve copied and that’s not art.
If you draw from photographs, and I know you do, I hope you’ve taken the next step and work from your own photos. Drawing from photos is a great way to learn how to draw, but working entirely from other people’s work might have allowed you to miss a few steps in the business of making art. The process of finding the scene that calls to you from life is a hugely important. Learning to listen to what speaks to your heart, and then finding a way to compose it into a scene that feels just right is the foundation of art.
Digital cameras are cheap and here’s a great book on composition:
Pictorial Composition: An Introduction
by Henry Rankin Poore
Off you go now. Go on. Jump off the deep end and create some real art.