Hi Bullet,

With organics the main thing to nail down is the topology of the model that you are making. Have a look online for similar animals in 3D and see if you can grab a wireframe for reference.

You need to firstly make loops that flow with firstly the major boney areas then onto the muscles.

Once you havet he jist of edge loops then have a think and a paint over of an animal/human to fit the loops and define where your going to add the said loops, this helps a lot when you get into Maya ad you already have a picture in your head of what you want to create before you start.

Then create a cube and go from there dividnign and slicing, I tend to define the eyes and mouth off the bat by extruding geo, it then makes it easier to add edge loops using the insert edge loop tool.

I tend to follow this method, it was form a guy who made gandalf in a hardcore modelling challenge on cgtalk, I dont know his name but credit to him. I used to do a diferent method, saw this and gave it a go and loved it. You'll find your own method, either box or edge by edge.