I still began by extruding from the mouth for this method but this time I did not take it all the way to the head. Instead:

1. I broke the red spline at the white dot and extruded in the direction of the red arrow.
2. Extruded an "eyemask" and connected this to the "mouth piece" as the yellow arrows show
3. The white spline was added to control the shape between the pieces.
4. The green arrow shows where the red spline would have gone if it was not broken.