It won't be animated, so flow isn't extremly important here, but it will use subdivision for smoothing, so I'd like to keep it all quads.  I'm using a nice little script plugin here, to quickly draw poly strips in the viewport for laying out the profile, and see what I get.

I always start faces or heads with the eye area, and work my way out from there.  So, I started by drawing a ring of polys in the viewport here, and just gave it a little shape with soft selection.

I'm only doing half of it, and then symmetry will take care of the rest.

I only had a rough idea of this creature to begin with, and it's only going to be an ornamental part of a hard-surface object (walking cane), so I'm not concerned with edge loop flow.  Only the fact I want all quads, and a logical topology here.

Ok, now it's looking like one of those creepy masks with the long noses.  But that's what I had in mind anyway, so I like that.

I'll eventually remove that middle edge loop that the symmetry modifier adds when it welds to two sides together.  I'm going to extrude some horns from the border edges of those holes in the top next.  However, I'm not set on what kind of horns I really want.

I quad-capped the inside of the mouth here, and just extruded a tongue from some of the polys.  Some soft selection tweaking to rough out the shape a littl more, and relaxed some of the verts here, to regularize the distribution of edges.

This is where I'm at right now.  So I'm thinking about the shape of the handle, and how I'll incorporate this into it.  I've looked at walking canes online, and most of the handles are contoured to fit the hand in a particular way.  I'm going to just extend some polys out of the back of this head, and extrude the shape of the handle from there.

I'm about half an hour in modeling at this point.

wow, thank you for sharing this.  It is so helpful to see the process, your end work is amazing.  Seeing the process makes it so much more understandable.

I like this Lux, the ones I've seen have a brass junction piece then the end of each ( cane and carved bit) are cut/shaped to fit.

airflamesred, that's a good bit of info.  I really didn't find many close shots of the junction point between the cane and handle, and I don't have any in on hand to look at, so I was kind of "winging it" based on some reference material I found.  That's helpful info, and I'm going to use it to come up with something better for that area.

Tonight, I'm starting out by removing the old horns, and adding new ones with more detail.  The above image shows my process for this step.  After deleting the horn, I simply capped the remaining hole with an Ngon temporarily, and used a tool that made it as perfectly round as possible.  Next, I'm going to use a special extrusion tool to extrude some longer, "curved" horns.  The tool I plan to use here is kind of unique to my modeling package, but I might show what it does in the next screencap, because it's pretty cool.

I like the horns at this point.  Tomorrow, I'll finish this model by adding some more detail to the eyes, and then the transitional area between the handle and cane, as airflames suggested, and begin the unwrapping.  Should be fun.

I like the longer horns much better.  This is a revealing thread.  I haven't seen someone model organics using polygon by polygon techniques like this in a while, except when retopologizing something.  I  thought it would be a much slower practice, but it looks like max has some useful features for this kind of modelling.  In Cinema, I would have gone with hacking it out from a box with subdivision and bevel, but I can see some advantages to this technique.  I've never seen an extrude feature like that before.  I admit that looks surprisingly interesting.  Let's see some more.

Ah the angry snail! Looking forward to the render.

Ouah! Thank you to show your skills. I love the character you imagined for this model, so quickly. I pull new polygons from the edges also. I can follow your guidance to the point of extrude, then different to make horns. The twist is not so automatique in Blender.

What I've done here is simply extend the border edge loop of the handle out along the XY coordinates, then use a "circularize" command to make them into a circle.  This will begin the brass fitting that connects the handle to the shaft of the cane.

Then I simply extend that loop down, creating a new ring of polys.

Then from underneath, I inset that border edge loop, to finish off the part that is to become the metal fitting.

Lastly, I extend that same border edge straight down, to pull out a cylinder of polygons that will be the shaft of the cane.

Does anyone know the average height of a character in Poser?  I'm sure this item will see the most use from people using that application, so I'd like to model it to work with the models there.  If anyone can provide that information, it would be most helpful in designing this model.  Thanks!

The bottom of the cane has a brass/metal collar and rubber tip.  So, I modeled these in, using edge loops, and beveling...

Notice the very tiny scratches on the surface here.  The metal can be whatever procedural metal material the user desires to use for this in their own software application, but the maps for imperfections (bump, specular, diffuse, and glossy) will be included with the model for users to create the same effect seen here.

Oh yeah!

Awesome...many thanks for sharing and posting this....

Swoit, moit!  I'm impressed by the results.  You should consider making video presentations of your modelling.  I never use edge modelling techniques, but this has given me good reason to try it.

Quote - Swoit, moit!  I'm impressed by the results.  You should consider making video presentations of your modelling.  I never use edge modelling techniques, but this has given me good reason to try it.

I certainly don't use this method for every model, but I find it very efficient for when I'm attacking some more complex geometry, which might blend hard and organic shapes in a particular way.

Quote - Does anyone know the average height of a character in Poser?  I'm sure this item will see the most use from people using that application, so I'd like to model it to work with the models there.  If anyone can provide that information, it would be most helpful in designing this model.  Thanks!

Probably too late for this now, mate.  I have an older verison of Poser on my system.  I think it's Poser 6?  I just did a search in the Poser forum for this answer, but didn't find anything useful.  I think Poser uses inches to measure units, but users can change that.

There's some interesting threads in the Poser forum.  That software is so far behind the industry standards in rendering, it isn't even funny.  I wouldn't worry much about modelling your models for that software.  Users can just rescale it in there if they want to use it bad enough.

Thank you for taking on the journy of this model.  It was insightful and helpful, also for such a beautiful endproduct.

The skyshop, do you use that just to test out what it looks like in HDR (I found the website it says its image based lighting for unity.)  Just trying to see how you use it in context with this workflow.

Quote - Thank you for taking on the journy of this model.  It was insightful and helpful, also for such a beautiful endproduct.  The skyshop, do you use that just to test out what it looks like in HDR (I found the website it says its image based lighting for unity.)  Just trying to see how you use it in context with this workflow.

Hil  Thank you for commenting.  I'm using dDO, which comes with Marmoset Skyshop, to help automate small details in my texture maps.  It's great for generating small scratches, imperfections, and detail maps.  I use the Skyshop only as a way to previsualize how the texture maps might look with proper materials and lighting.  Since it's real-time, it provides instant feedback and results.  It's not nearly as accurate as a full production render, but it gives an excellent idea of how things will look.  It helps also to provide a quick way to preview the topology, and find any imperfect smoothing or areas in the mesh I might want to fix last minute.  Global illumination with HDR is great at exposing mesh errors and topology issues.

This is so inspiring! Thanks for sharing, I learned a lot from seeing your work flow.