I'm not at all sure that Ideogram's upload feature would do what you're looking for. From my admittedly limited experimentation with that feature, it's more focused on generating new images based on a derived prompt from your upload rather than really basing generations on the actual image. (If you remix and turn the remix percentage up high, it will follow the uploaded image more closely - but it won't modify it so much as copy it with variations.) And the "canvas" image editor for uploaded images doesn't really seem to do anything Photoshop or Gimp couldn't do.
I like Ideogram because I can't draw at all, and it lets me create fairly complex images that follow detailed prompts fairly well. (I usually do only photographic-style images, since I prefer not to make anything that looks drawn when I can't draw.) But for an actual artist like yourself who wants AI as a subsidiary tool, Ideogram might not do what you want.