I have no prior experience in blender or 3d object creation.
This was created in Blender 2.69 while following the "Character Creation in Blender lesson 1-2a" course by Jonathan Williamson.
It took me about a week to complete this lesson in my free time.
Things that I learned:
1. Accidentally creating double vertices is easy to do.
2. Paying attention to what vertices/edges/faces of a mesh is selected is important.
3. The intuition behind the process of creating a base mesh.