Inorganics: How to make even bands around a round object?

[bperes]

Hi all, I sculpted this vinylmation Mickey Mouse figure the other day and any inorganic sculpt is a bloody pain to get to be even and consistent.  Interestingly enough for me, the arms were the hardest thing to do on this thing!  How would you approach making the cuff on on Mickey's glove?

 

So I tried cutting a section of the arm out because the arm is a specific shape and I wanted to maintain that profile.  Then I tried to use the brushes to bloat the resulting cylinder-like shape to a rounded donut shape.  It was incredibly uneven, and I had to noodle a bunch just to get it to look smooth.

 

Starting from scratch, I tried using the pose tool, thinking I can just scale up an even band of voxels.  But selecting that band was hard because I could not make a soft enough selection easily no matter how many times I clicked on "smooth selection".

 

I ended up here using splines to make a donut and filled it in.  Then I just kept moving around the cuff and sculpted it as smooth as I can go.  I just feel there's a better way to do this.  

 

Thanks!

[TimmyZDesign]

When using the Pose Tool, in the E Panel (a.k.a. the Stroke Mode Panel) there is an option for "border width". Change the value there and you will see that you can make very gradual and smooth selections or very sharp and abrupt selections (or anything in between). Also you can start your selection far away from your target deformation area so as to clip off an abrupt starting point of the selection (if desired). Additionally the selection can be edited by using a brush stroke mode to smooth it, and/or you can delete parts of the selection before applying deformation. Also make sure the "default" shader is applied to your mesh so you can see the color gradations of your selection (other shaders render the selection only as gray, which is less informative). There are also deformation cages available if desired.