I'm sure it can be done in Blender, but I have no experience of that. You might also try out Sculptris. That looks pretty useful for organic modelling. It's going to be pretty high-poly though.
http://pixologic.com/sculptris/
More useful might be the free open-source subdivision modeller Wings3D
http://www.wings3d.com/
As for SketchUp, I can't think of any free smoothing plugin to get that final smooth effect, but Joint Push Pull is free/donate. To subdivide the mesh, it is possible to use the free Fractal Erode plugin with iterations set to 1 and the pointyness set to 0