Hi Burr yeah if the character is simple enough and has a kind of cartoony style it can be possible. But that's kind of a special case.

But even simple characters often tend to still have a little bit of details in the nose and mouth area that doesn't quite look right if those things are kind of tacked on as separate objects, aside from Mr Potato Head-y stuff... It's pretty frequent that especially the nose is more sculpted and fully blended into the rest of the face.

Actually Sculptris (http://www.sculptris.com) is a pretty good tool for a lot of that kind of stuff - it's easier to learn that type of brush based sculpting than regular polygon modeling particularly with Sculptris.

- Michael