Inspiring work

Detail from "The light of hope" by Deng Jiansi

Here are some sites that have tons of tutorials on every imaginable (well...) method of doing models, maps, lights etc. Of course the list is endless since the 3D community is so huge, but you have to start somewhere. Thanks to Nada for providing these links.
One thing that you will realize is that you must have a basic understanding of different techniques like box and spline-modeling, texturing tools etc. to fully understand some of the more advanced tutorials, however I think by now it would benefit you enormously to check them out if just to get inspired by the level of work being done worldwide and, I must say, by the generous sharing of ideas and techniques by so many great artists.

Links: http://www.3dtutorials.sk/
http://www.cgtutorials.com/

This is a spline modeling tutorial which is clear and simple. Angelina Jolie by Song, Hwasup.
Link to PDF file.

From concept to creation

See how closely the production has followed the storyboard. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. All the time spent in planning the shot to tell the story pays off when you are doing the extremely time consuming work of animating, whether in clay or in CG. You won't have much time to change characters, situations and action, so try to get it to your liking at this stage. And have fun!

Storyboard and end result

Click the images to see a full size version.
The pictures are taken from the book Creating 3-D animation about the Aardman animations. I highly recommend this book if you are serious about animation. It will give you not only great ideas and behind the scene looks at some of the most memorable animations of our time but will also give you a sense of what it takes to do such work.

3ds Max Bandmaster

This is an example of a single frame which tells a compelling story. The object carries within itself the history of its owner, of the music it played. How much life has been stored in this object? How can that story be retrieved? See other interesting models, backgrounds and concept work here.

From the third dimension

Where are we? we define the uni-verse with our own coordinate system. We are the x the y and the z. The Matrix got it right, the grid is our frame of reference. Now, as it happens, the grid is so fine, the mesh so dense that we imagine it solid and real.