The hand

The centrepiece of my beer cooler commission will be a decaying zombie hand.  Therefore, I started it by getting cracking on the zombie hand. 

Firstly, here's a close-up of the fingertips and fingernails.  I really enjoy sculpting fingernails, and I'm quite pleased with these.

My preferred way of making a hand is to make the fingers separately and then glue them together, which is what I've done here.  In this case, I've glued them together around the base I'll be using, but I haven't glued them to the base.  Before I do that I'll epoxy the hand and paint it.

These are the fingers prior to being stuck together in a hand shape.  At this point they're nothing more than long sticks with knobbly knuckles.

Here they are in the process of getting stuck together around the beer cooler base:

From here, the next stage is to put soft tissue on the palm and wrist.