There was a period where I played A LOT with photoshop. I think there's little I ever did directly from scratch in Photoshop, because I have this awful habit of drawing my outlines in MSpaint and only coloring them in Photoshop.
http://www.young-link.deviantart.com/ Check my gallery, but I'm sticking up some particular ones:
(I didn't do that outline, by the way, I just colored it)
<--(this is downsized)
All of the backgrounds there were done from scratch (the water in the Dratini picture is textured with a stock photo template). I know some are cheap, depends how much time I spent on them. There was a short point where I fell in love with doing backgrounds, and I made that mountain picture. Can you see the silhouette of anything laying in the grass? nn Step back if you can't.