How do you start you drawings: with line art or with a shape? Artistic "holy war":)

When I went to drawing casses in traditional art my teacher was an adherent of starting the drawing with a line art. With building the shape, and seeking for correct proportions. 

But when I went to digital drawing classes my teacher there was an adherent of another vision, and told us always to start our drawings with  silhouette. So I learned how to do it differently.

Now when I'm free to make my own choise how to begin my drawings I still chose line art 99% of time. These are two completely different approaches, and I think they even lead to different results. 

This is an example of silhouette drawing exercise I made on my drawing classes. The task was to do it really quickly, not more then a minute for one shape. So, here I made sketches of a dog in different poses.

But usually I take another way, and then it looks like this, for example:

I prefer to know how my character will look before I start coloring and shading. And I want to be sure I didn't miss any detail. Of course in the shape version it also can be easily fixed, but for me it's more complicated. So, I start with a line art and then check out the shape filling it with black.

Anyway, during my digital classes I had to create a scene with background and several characters. It was long ago, and I decided to create WoW fan art. The required condition was to create the characters from shapes, and they looked like this:

And the final result looked like this:

So, there's a choise between clarity in details and the readable shape. I feel like starting with a line art I have more control. At the same time when I start with the shape it's more expressive. I think both methods have the right to live.

How do you prefer to start your art if you do?:)

Thank you for watching:)

Love, Inber