Airflames, Metaseq is sorted, I haven't experimented with orthogonal face in Blender yet.

Nrudock, yeah for the basic shape of the head to pull it into an oval I'm going to need two or three long and lat edges running a complete loop around the whole cube.
I'm just concerned with later on when trying to knife in details like eye socket rings and mouth. The knife keeps storing itself back away after only one slice.

I'm trying to remember my box modeling experience in Max ten years back. I think the artists didn't cut out the details with knife. Instead they started off with heavy subdivision and simply selected edges and verts from that.