Starting Small Sketch Series

I've been mulling over what exactly to do in my home studio as daily practice. Do I work on finished pieces? Do I do a bunch of practice sketches and then follow up with a finished piece? I really wasn't sure what to do to keep my hand in it every week. But after checking out this website, I decided that the idea of small sketches was a good one, and that's what I am doing right now (with the odd more finished piece thrown in from time to time). I'm doing things slightly different than the artist on that website: my series is one charcoal drawing, one pencil drawing, and one oil painting of the same object(s).

I originally intended to do an ongoing series of small sketches a year ago, but didn't follow through. This is my start:

(The pieces are still in a notebook, and I have only recently taped a piece of wax paper over them for protection, so the charcoal is a bit worse for wear.)

This is the first series a year later:



It's pretty embarrassing. The problem turned out to be trying to stick to a rigid schedule of producing an entire series of sketches each week. I had scheduled Monday for pencil, Tuesday for charcoal, Wednesday for oil, Thursday for figure drawing (not part of this series), then weekends for catching up. But it turns out that I only had time to do that during the holidays-and barely enough time even then! So I rushed to finish each piece on time, which meant that the end result was of poor quality. I don't like to do that, so I've changed my expectations to basically one piece per week, as opposed to an entire series of 3 sketches per week. Hopefully I can do better than that, and part of my goal is to motivate myself to work more, and more often, in the studio. But I don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity.

Here is the oil sketch: