I think i am finally close to the result i want.. should be able to quickly finish up the normal map tonight.. I tried the sculpting from two objects, from multires, but everytime even when i just built the collar bones up, when looking closely there were marks, lines, little triangles, which if trying to polish out or smooth somehow became worse... I have no explanation for this as it didn't happen on the male model sculpt..
Eventually i found GLSL texture painting - it has nothing to do with sculpting, its basically painting the model with black or white (a bump map really) but as you paint you see the results in realtime, and in the end you bake your results to a normal map.. Awesome!! because if you save the black and white bump image, you can then move to Photoshop where you can refine and add, then go back to blender and complete baking. One thing though that is not in the video, is that if you are drawing something that takes a while, you cant just save the blend file... when you open it all the work is gone.. you must save out your images with your progress separately.
https://vimeo.com/21186170