As this is for practice, I would actually use the 128-face sphere topology as is and try to shape it into a very stylized knight. Forget about details, just go for basic recognizable shape. I think that might actually be a very good kind of exercise for beginners: take a fixed, very-low-polygon topology and see what you can do with it.

Or since the sphere has these annoying poles at the top and bottom, maybe you could use a cube and subdivide it twice, which would give you 96 faces.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.