A little blender help here?

Judge Death.

I need to make an item in blender different than what I'm used to, which is mostly hard, mechanical objects. I need to make a stereotypical alien arm, think the standard little grey big headed alien here, OK?

I want it to be reaching down from the top of the image, bending at the elbow, the forearm coming forward in a 3/4 view and the hand (say thumb and 3 fingers) holding a puppet control like the one in the godfather logo.

So this might need to be a softer, more organic look and I might even need to make some very simple bones to move the elbow and fingers. could someone direct me to a good tutorial on this?