Modeling the human ear...made easy?

Ok, so far in this class we have mostly focused on the "main" parts of the body and have only just begun to model things like the human hand in great detail. I was surfing around some of the other tutorials the guy who made the Hand modeling one Arturo gave us has online and found this one about how to model an ear. Just like the hand tutorial he moves very quickly through the steps. I was able to follow pretty much exactly what he was doing for about the first two minutes as he is lining up all of the vertexes. After that I get pretty lost because he is doing things I am a little less familiar with. At the beginning he talks about how important it is to make each vertex line up with a specific part of the ear. I found that while modeling my hand this was also pretty important. When I first "smoothed" it I just kind of stared moving vertexes around in groups to get the shape I wanted. I quickly realized that I was digging myself a huge hole and had to go back and reposition many of them so that my thumb didn't look too deformed. At this point, I am finding it very hard to imagine myself modeling something with so much structural detail as an ear.

The person who made the video has disabled embedding so click here to watch it off of YouTube directly.