Here's another student piece from my class, this one done by Jonah. This week I was teaching lettering. I'm always a stickler for it since I that's how I came up in the comics ranks.
This part of the class was showing how to write a word and build it up into a piece of display lettering. It's a 
technique I learned at Bernie Shulman's (now Marc's) when I had to learn how to letter a poster without roughing it in with pencil. What we did was to take a colored marker and write the word as we would normally, then build it up and go back in with a black marker to outline it and add a shadow. Keeping the black until the last step kept the darker ink from smearing into the lighter.
When people try to make these display letters, a lot of times they try to draw the outline without any underdrawing. And yeah, I can draw those letters without any structure now, but that's after a lot of practice. It's like math class. You have to show your work before you can do it in your head.