Just plain how?

I'm relatively new to SecondLife, and am working on creating custom textures/appearances based off of some original characters of mine. However, many of them have some complex features that aren't in the basic tutorials and templates, such as obis, or clothing hanging off their shoulders or from their belts. How would I go about creating something like this for them, or custom ears for that matter? I don't have a 3D program to work with, but creating textures via Photoshop is no problem for me. Does anyone have any resources or templates I could use, or know someone with designs similar to this?

Thank you!

You should look at augmenting your clothing and skin items with appropriately textured attachments. Right-click on any item in your inventory and you will find a variety of options under 'Wear' for attaching an object to your avatar. You can then position the item using the 'Edit' tools. Once the item is removed, the attachment settings will be saved until they are modified or changed with a further edit.

A heck of a lot of attachments can be made from the SL building tools and you can apply various features like flexibility, lighting, glow, bumpiness and shinyness to them. For some organic shapes such as ears, you may find it useful to experiment with sculpting techniques.

One of the best ways to learn about designing attachments like obis and capes is to explore SL and see how other designers have done it. Obis, for example, are quite easy -- a simple combination of a couple of torii or so. Wander to a Japanese sim, look around for an obi, and reverse engineer it. Buy one and take it apart. I'm NOT advising you to copy another creator's work, but you can get inspiration and a better understanding of building techniques by seeing how others have solved your problem.

I would specifically suggest going to Grendel's Children for research on this sort of thing. They have lots of highly imaginative avatars that are spectacularly well conceived and constructed. From the jello fruit salad avatar wobbles just like jello when you move to the little green sloth that hangs under a chair when you go to sit on one, their stuff is always inspiring.