A few thoughts

Before I dive into the character. I think it is important to tell you that modeling a character can be a tedious task... You want to make it as easy as possible on yourself. Do not limit yourself to modeling just with the modeling tools. Remember that when you are making a character you want clean geometry. People often over look using animation tools to model with. Tools in the animation set that I use a lot while modeling are: Lattice, Non-Linear, and motion paths. You can often achieve tasks in a few seconds which would take several minutes if not longer otherwise. Remember, delete history.

Nurbs Modeling

The first thing you need to do it look at your character and see what you can use to model it?

You must excuse my crudely drawn lines... But as you can see here, there are several ways which we could model this character in nurbs. I use a combination of all of these options. I model the chest/torso out of a cylinder, the arms I use a cylinder, the hands and feet I use cylinders, lofts or spheres. The head I usually patch together or more recently I just make straight out of polys, that goes for the hands too. Needless to say, no matter which way I go, I am going to have to do a lot of cutting and attaching. And remember, there is no "wrong combination", there might be an easier combination though. You will just have to experiment and see what you like best.

Start out with simple geometry

Delete history, detach surface down the middle and snap end cvs to grid

Duplicate (-1 x if you are working across x axis) with instance option turned on

 

insert isoparm if needed