Does a painter need drawing skills too?

Painting in the manner of modern impressionism is a very different approach from drawing (at least the way drawing is usually taught). You certainly need some drawing-skills, but what is most important is to learn to judge relationships (which of course one does in drawing too). Painting with colour involves relationship of colour, of value, of relative warmness/coolness of colour, brightness/dullness, etc. And you go from large to small, 'sculpting' shapes and form with colour. A flat underpainting is sculpted into seeming to have a three-dimensional shape, by adding colour to what you already have on paper/canvas.

Small to big
There are several methods of drawing, and most of them involve drawing edges as lines, and then shading to let value create form. Drawing, one exercises a careful attention to details, right from the start. Certain schools advocate drawing one eye carefully, and then spreading out from it, using the completed eye as an anchor against which one measure the rest of the features.

Big to small
Painting goes from general large shapes to successively smaller corrections. So the thinking is sort of the other way around. No bogging down in details at the outset, volume before details, details almost an afterthought.

Excellent book on drawing
Some teachers teach another method of drawing that is compatible with, and very similar to, the thinking behind painting. One such very good teacher is Carl Purcell, who gives a great course in his book “Drawing with your Artist’s Brain”. See it at Amazon.

Old “truths”
The academies of the 1700s and 1800s really hammered in what they perceived to be the truth -- "you can't paint if you can't draw". So students spent one to three hours on drawing before allowed to paint. This is still taught as a truth.

Need to know
There are other schools of thought. One that I'm particularly fond of is: "you learn what you need to learn when you feel the need to learn it" -- and then you yourself actively search for the knowledge which makes sense in the context of the whole, and which improves your ability to 'say' what you want to say with your art.

Would you?
Let’s say you’re fascinated by colour and feel a burning desire to paint. Would you really want to spend 3 years only drawing in graphite or charcoal before being allowed to use a brown and a white too? Or would you like it better if you were to get a box with gorgeous colour, experimenting, playing, and painting. When you discovered that you don’t know how to draw an oval, and that you really would like to be able to paint a portrait where the person is recognizable as a human being – would you then feel motivated to learn good drawing skills? I ask, because it is not a given. We have different methods and manners of acquiring knowledge and skills. What I’ve described is my personal preference.

Certainly
In this method of painting that I work with, we often start with a simple “skeleton” drawing, consisting of the outlines of the silhouettes of the largest masses, divided into light masses and shadow masses. Monet didn’t even do that, he just went in straight with loosely scribbled colour, searching out the shapes. But oh yes, drawing skills are still needed, and are intrinsic to painting skills.