My friend, keep proportions in mind, the human automatically detects when a certain figure isn't in its right proportions. at the moment just worry about shaping i up the way you want to then you go into proportions. Just a tip from your old pal. When you get to nurbs modeling you won't have as much freedom. Then again I haven't modeled a poly character so I'll get to it after a while. First I need to master patch modeling which is a very technical task.