Thanks tantarus. So that's what the 'View>Background Image' is for!  I already had a reference photo, but hadn't realised I could actually set it to appear in the modeler - doh!

I'm very interested in your 'too dense a mesh' comment (please bear in mind that I am still a relative novice!). There are 1664 faces - each sphere for my starting point had 16 rings of vertices, with 32 vertices in each ring. This seemed to me, at that time, the minimum needed to get a good enough 'roundness' on the pawn, while allowing enough flexibility to manipulate the shape into the other pieces.

But looking at the result I see your point. If I was to remodel from scratch (maybe I will, maybe I won't!) what sort of face count (or number of rings/segments for the spheres) would you suggest?

Also, since the very top of the pawn became the tip of the knight's nose, the faces all converge, making the mesh even more dense here. Maybe I should slide some of the edge loops back from the nose area to the eye area? This would perhaps give me the extra faces I need to model the eye?

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The 3Dcheapskate* occasionally posts sensible stuff. Usually by accident.
And it usually uses Poser 11, with units set to inches. Except when it's using Poser 6 or PP2014, or when its units are set to PNU.

*also available in ShareCG, DAZ, and HiveWire3D flavours (the DeviantArt and CGBytes flavour have been discontinued).