Witchy Hand - Learning Part: Blender.

I'm pretty new to 3D modelling, and just picked up blender a few months ago to try to get into it. For a long time, I was nervous about sculpting, because I thought that I would be bad at it. Once I finally started messing with it, it's probably one of my favorite aspects of the character pipeline (admittedly, I haven't done much with rigging/animating, aside from just messing around a bit). 

This is probably the third sculpt that I've done so far. The other two were mostly just trying to get the hang of general sculpting in blender, and I've learned a lot on each so far. This particular sculpture was the first that I really struggled with the mesh, as I went along. I wanted to get in close to do a lot of detail, but it became very  frustrating to deal with the Dynamesh, even if it was only occasionally turned on. So, I learned about voxel remeshing, which was kind of decent, but I sort of had some troubles with that as well. It quickly made my model pretty intensive, even for my reasonably decent computer. It also made weird holes in my mesh occasionally, especially around the fingernails. I've since decided that I probably should've  made the fingernails a separate object, entirely. 

While I was sculpting, I really focused on the profile of the hand from the side view, because I really envisioned something like it's posed above. I looked at it from other angles while I was sculpting, but I really focused on that side view. As a consequence, it was pretty lackluster from any other angle. I'll provide some examples, below. 

Another thing that I learned was that once the material/subsurface scattering modifiers  were applied, it was pretty difficult to see  the detail, even if I did a more even, front on lighting. So, I really need to add deeper detail and not be afraid if it looks really exaggerated on the matcap. 

I added some different lights just to play around with it, but I ultimately decided that I wanted to try again in Zbrush, so I didn't go back to fix and add additional detail. I've been wanting to just get Zbrush, and try it out. So far it has been an incredibly frustrating experience, more so than Blender. Even so, I intend to continue to try to make it work. 

Technique wise, I mostly made this with grab, smooth, and crease. A lot of the professional sculptors that I've seen tend to work more by building up with brushes, as opposed to pulling. I might try to approach my next  attempt more from that technique, and see how much I like it. It makes more sense from a structural standpoint. It would probably also be more convenient not to have to fix  things because I distorted them whenever I moved them. 

Most of this is just my thoughts as I was working on the project, and I figured that I would keep them documented. Maybe they'll help someone else, as they familiarize themselves with the sculpting process. 

Generally, I think that the proportions are bad from the top view. The thumb is comically big. The other fingers are too small, and they should be closer together. I would normally go back  and clean it up, but  I'm more interested in learning zbrush right now. So, maybe we'll get handv2 sometime later this week, if I'm able to figure out what is going on in this program. 

Oh, and I barely did any detail on the back of the hand. Which was another thing that I was going to do.