I think i'm pretty comfortable with polygons.

When attempting to add the head to the body in the image above, I did try giving the subdiv a polygon proxy and then extruding the top faces, in the hopes of then being able to form the polygons into a sphere, however it extruded four lumps instead of one block. Is there a way in subdiv mode that I can tell it to extrude all edges equally? see screenshot below to see what I'm talking about: