Modeling complex organic shapes like characters and creatures can be very difficult in Edit Mode. Instead, for those types of forms, we generally use sculpting. Sculpting is a much more natural way to interact with meshes and should feel familiar to anyone who has worked with clay.

Blender's sculpt tools are helped immensely by enabling Dynamic Topology, remeshing, and now switching to Vulkan over OpenGL as the back-end viewport renderer, so that you can work with higher polycounts with ease.

You can learn more about Blender's brushes and the sculpting workflow in Kent Trammell's CORE Fundamentals of Digital Sculpting.