Making a brand new weapoon using your own hands

[GuildNavigator]

Hi everyone.
I was wondering if could be possible to create brand new sprites basing this work on REAL photos. I mean, you take a good and almost perfect set of pictures of your hands (maybe holding a pistol, a melee weapon, or anything you want) and then you re-elaborate them with some graphical program (ex:Adobe Photoshop, etc.): for example using filters and darkening layers to make hands more similar to those in Doom. That's what I want to do in order to create a brand new weapon. What do you think about this way of making it? Anybody of you already tried this without/with success?
Any suggestion or tip is very well accepted.
PS: I already made a set of my hands holding a typical italian pistol, but I haven't treated graphically those pics...

[Xim]

That's actually how most of the doom weapons were made in the first place. Such things can have very mixed results though.

[NeuralStunner]

Just a thought. I'd think you would be better off capturing digital video - good animation would be easier to obtain if you actually performed the movements you want. Just repeat each action a few times and choose the "take" you like best.

(I've had the same idea, so that's why I've thought this out. )

[Captain Awesome]

Actually, thats how the pistol and shotgun were made for Duke Nukem 3D. They took videos then digitized frames from them. You can find these videos on 3DR's website.

[wildweasel]

I've made one such attempt with a toy AK-47 that I had lying around. See it here. The hands are still Doomguy's, though, edited from base Doom graphics.

[GuildNavigator]

Wow wildweasel! That's really nice work.. but what program did you use to make your pics sprites?
Maybe using single-taken shots could be more difficult than using a video.. Anyway thanks to all.
Is there anybody who tried this using single shots and not videos?