Before start, I want to recommend one great plugin from www.highend3d.com. It’s called activeSmoothPoly. This plugin makes tab button act like smooth. So when holding tab mesh is smoothed and when release mesh is low again.

First I’m going to describe poly tools in the polygons shelf.

So first eight are poly primitives.

Then, goes combine. Combine merges two poly objects into one. That objects became shells.

Separate is separating poly objects on its shells. Every shell will be separate object.

Mirror is making opposite side of the object.

Smooth, making polygon faces smoother. *

Smooth proxy, making objects smooth, and controlling it trough proxy mesh.

Reduce is used for reducing the number of polygons in the mesh.

Split polygon tool, is very powerful tool, that’s used for splitting mesh. *

Extrude, is used to extrude selected components across manipulator. *

Bridge, is used to connect two or more edges.

Chamfer, is used to make vertices more round.

Cut faces tool, splits mesh across the line.

Merge Vertices, merges vertices based on the distance. *

Merge border edges, merges edges on the borders of the mesh.

Flip edge, is used to change diagonal of polygon.

Collapse is used to turn face or edge into a point.

Extract is used to tear off the selected faces from mesh.

Sculpt geometry tool is very powerful tool for deforming geometry.

Last three are UV mapping tools.

There are two more icons, they are also for UV mapping.

* Tools used in this tutorial

Also very powerful things for poly modeling:

-          Shift + RMB gives menu with actions you can perform on current selection. It speeds up modeling a lot.

-          Control + LMB gives menu with selection tools. Here you can find select edge loop/edge ring tool.

-          Move manipulator can constraint itself to axes. This is done by Control+click on any axis. To get to normal mode just Control+click in the middle of manipulator.

So to get started, create poly cube and set divisions to 2, 3, 2.

Delete one side and go to duplicate options. Here check instance and set -1 for Z axis (in my case it was Z). Put original into one layer and instance in other layer. Turn reference for instance layer (second box in the layer list).

Tweak the vertices to get basic head shape.

Then select the bottom face. This will be the neck. Extrude it. When manipulator appears change its mode by pressing that blue button. This will change mode to world space rotation.

Move the face down and delete the interior face. You can delete bottom face also.

Then add some more polygons by using split polygon tool.

Then with split polygon tool add triangle where the mouth will be. Delete that triangle face.

Split more to create area for the nose and the eyes.

Split where eye shall be. Delete two triangle faces.

Split the mouth like this.

Now first split from mouth to the left, and then split to create four triangles like this.

Then just delete edges to get quads (quad - four sided face). Continue splitting on the left side.

Extrude the nose, and move the upper edge down.

Create another split. You are creating edge loops around the mouth.