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Pat,
I agree with Tom too. Do both. That's what I do at school. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings we work on the figure - either in charcoal, black and white paint, or color, depending on our progress. But EVERY Tuesday and Thursday is reserved for pencil figures, so we're drawing constantly. I've seen great improvement in my drawing skills and I know it just comes from all the practice I'm getting. What about splitting your time like this?
Last fall I made color mixing charts of our palette and found that to be a great help in my color mixing. (I think they were in the pictures I sent you a while back.)
As for the best route to go from drawing to painting - this is the way I've been taught - and the longer I'm here, the more I see the benefit of it: We start out in charcoal, to learn drawing, value, and edges. Then we go to black and white paint to continue drawing, value, edges, and add paint handling. Then we go to color in still life, while we're still in black and white on the figure. Once we get used to color in the still life we go to portrait and figure. Now that I'm working in color I can definitely see why we're taught this way. I can easily imagine how I'd be painting if I had just jumped right into it without going through the process. I very well remember all the piles of mud I made 20+ years ago, before I gave it up in frustration.
I can relate to the "time running out" you talked about. That's why I decided to go to school. It's also why we move halfway across the country to do it. I knew I'd need to be away from the old home commitments to get the time I needed. I also know when I go back home I'm going to have to train my family and friends to see me as a working woman, rather than a hobby artist.
Another thing we do that you might find helpful is memory drawing. We do it two ways. I have a notebook with silhouette shapes, going from very simple (a three sided shape) to complex (three ballerinas in tutus). We use these shapes to draw from memory. First we put tracing paper over the shape, then put a plumb line on it somewhere, and maybe a dot or two depending on the complexity of the shape. Then look at it, measuring with your eyes, pencil, or whatever - can't use rulers. Then we put away the shape and complete the drawing from memory. I confess that I tend to go in spurts of doing and not doing this. The first thing they had us do was just learn to see an inch. And then different lengths of line. You can make the shapes yourself, I've done it when I got bored with the handouts.
The other kind of memory drawing is where the model gets up for five minutes and we can look but not draw. Then she gets down and we can draw. When she's on the stand we have to cover our paper. We repeat this process for three hours, using the last 20 minutes to fix our mistakes. This really helped me to see where I wasn't looking! You could do something like this with objects rather than the figure.
Sorry, I didn't mean to go on so long! Hope this gives you some ideas.
Deb
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