Could Somebody Lend Me A Hand??  Why, Thank You, Sir!

For a recent assignment, I needed to show a nervous man peeping into a book. I decided to construct the man’s face from two different photos as shown
in the previous post. I needed a hand to hold the book. To give the illustration a
unified feel, I decided to also construct the hand from a photograph. I started with
this photo by Mihai Eustatiu which I found on Stock.XCHNG:

I downloaded the photo, opened it in Photoshop, and rotated it 90 degrees. I used the Pen tool to precisely select the hand, then inverted the selection and deleted the rest of
the photo. I applied two Adjustment commands (Curves, Brightness/Contrast) to lighten the hand:

The hand had a slightly yellow cast, so I used the Replace Color command to
adjust it. In the Replace Color dialogue box, I selected the Eyedropper tool, set
the Fuzziness level to 200 (to maximize the number of pixels selected), and clicked on what I thought was an “average” bit of skin (not too light, not too dark). Then I adjusted the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness sliders to give the hand a pinkish cast:

I used the Warp tool to stretch the hand and elongate the wrist. Then I used a soft watercolor brush to color over the hair on the hand. Finally, still using a soft watercolor brush, I alternated between Normal and Linear Dodge mode to smooth and even out the skin tones:  

Here’s how the hand looked in the finished illustration: