Hey Killer. Protheus has got a point. Don't try and do any character modeling without an image plane. I'm new to Maya too and I am working on a male model that I had no image plane for. Let me tell you. If I knew then what I know now? I'd have this damn thing done. But key to "pulling", "pushing" and "bending" your character is to do it uniformly. Like, if your going to move a point on the right shoulder, multi select the exact same point on the left shoulder and move it to. If you want to see an early post of my man you can paste this link in your brower.
https://www.simplymaya.co.uk/forums/s...=&threadid=741