Get cracking on some rigging and animation. Or just use prerigged characters to practice your animations. I've heard XSI's animation is pretty snazzy, Blur seems to like it.
You need to work in lower subdivisions, and restart from square one. I would recommend going out, buying some Sculpty and practicing scultping with your hands.
There's so many "famous" people in gaming related industries know by their aliases, it's practically normal. John TotalBiscuit Bain. Sean Day9 Plott. Ice Frog. Gooba. Notch.
Took a little break from my job and cranked out this quickie model to practice a little bit. Not polished by any means, but maybe only an hour or two of work.
I'm studying at University, and only just getting the hang of this stuff lol. I feel I'm still very very rubbish but I'll get there eventually - just practice ;)
Started with some basic props in my free time to practice baking ( quite a hassle while I get how my hard the edges should be :# ) and progress the blockout.
Yeah, to echo above, lots of concept artists use a basic blockout in 3D to get the perspective and proportions laid out before painting over. It's a fairly common practice.
Neal Hirsig's Tutorials are how I learned Blender. Easy, bite-sized videos that go though all the basic commands and settings giving practical examples of each.
Not sure this will have a lot of application within Blender, but I'll link anyways. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fletcher/practical-python-learn-programming-for-the-real-wo?ref=category