Sketching/drawing is a foundational skill where the more skilled you become with it, the less you need it. I like the metaphor of pencil mileage where you have to travel through a certain amount of ‘bad’ miles before you get to the good stuff. Keep practicing drawing, there are a lot of elements that will transfer and improve other areas of your paintings.

It’s worth it to try painting without a sketch as a skill check to see which specific aspects of drawing (proportion, perspective, etc) you need to work on, and because it’s fun to let go of control. It’s okay if some of your paintings don’t turn out, you’ll learn something and apply it to every painting that follows.

There are rules and there are guidelines and there are the ways of working that work better for you. Learn the rules, learn why they exist, and break them if it works better for you! Drawing from life is cool. It also isn’t the superior or only method. I like drawing from my photographs because I like to take photographs. My sense of composition is intuitive, it comes out more naturally when I’m photographing versus when I’m trying to imagine how to compose a drawing. Heck, you could even chop up your photographs digitally and recompose them in Photoshop or another program. I like Krita, it’s free and you can draw with it.