How Limited Is My Imagination To My Skill

During quarantine I have had issues defining myself as a person and how i want to achieve my artistic dreams. The way i create a lot of my graphics and drawings are by combining different pictures and adding my own aesthetic to certain details. Yet inevitably i found the weakness of this. I have a very large amount of ideas inside my head that follow original concepts for once and I have strayed so far into this style of art that i feel that i have forgotten how to draw on my own. I wanted to try something different so i tried to do what i normally do by getting reference pictures, but tracing them in my mind. What i would do is picture in image in the highest quality i could conjure and then open my eyes and trace what i could gather from it. In all honest, it did not end up good at all. Despite the quality of the image, it felt like it was something that i could work on. Though I am still not sure if it is possible due to my lack of skill, but it is the very reason that I wish to improve. The picture that is above the post is sort of a representation of what i was attempting to do. As you can see that lack of detail comes from the difficulty of trying to piece together fragments of imagination into a real thing. I tried to implement a little scenario of what is going on with a buddy of mine. Obviously the Illustrator version of this looks better than the actual sketch but i tried my best not to add anything new so that i could get a clean look at what came from my brain.

I haven't been able to find anyone else who does things like this but i'm hoping that i can find a similar story and maybe find a way to advance on my new imagination tracing power. I sincerely hope that the fact that i'm still in a way just tracing does not come back to bite me however.