The Zbrush way to do that would be to define your extruded shapes with the mask tool, then create polygroups from this mask and from there you have a tool that modifies the topology to make it follow the curves nicely. I don't remember the precise process, though.
Take the liquify tool in photshop to your reference and blow up some of the defining features. It will help you to figure out where your focal points are so you know what you need to hit. At least for modeling faces anyway :)
It looks like you've over emphasized the "S" at the back of her neck just a little bit. There are muscles there that define the "flow". Her collar bones are also a tad low. The clavicle is more or less a straight bone that twists to flows towards the shoulder.
Thank you for the reply. I'll be starting to try and implement your observations. Just one thing, what did you mean by "nostrils are defined too much into the tip"? No enough difference between the two parts and their intersection or is it something about their shape?
generally speaking, you have to remove any vertex that doesnt define a shape, eg. all of those on the edges of the front face. i dont have time to go into detail, but if you follow this advice, you can get this optimised to 95% :)
Wow, that's a really cool link Grimm_Wrecking! Thanks a bunch for sharing! I'll definately look over it more closely when I get back home. I'll go over the spec map a few times before I call it done. :)
That model just gleams well made, love it. My only crit is I can't really define exactly what material you're going for on it, I can't tell if it's a plastic or a metal at this point. The modelling says metal but the texture says plastic.
Splines and the sweep modifier. It has built in I-Beam, L-Beam, T-Beam and box shapes built in and if those don't work, you can define a custom shape. It makes your UV layout for you also, good stuff.
Fonts are being blocked by the browser as they're being loaded over http, and not https. You can also load fonts like this: //fonts.googleapis.com - it's load via https or http depending on what the site is loading from. Instead of defining http:// or https://
I really like the design; regarding the texturing, it's a bit soft , I would limit the use of the airbrush and add more defined details everywhere; and don't forget the highlights (since it looks like a totally hand painted character, right?) example: