Honestly I'm not the best person to ask on what resistance you'll get which higher gauge wire, as I pretty much only use 28 and 30 on occasion. It also greatly depends on the diameter of your wick/coil, as a larger diameter will require less wraps for the same resistance.
That build there is 28ga, each coil is 1ohm for a total resistance of .5ohm. Not really appropriate for a vamo, just used it as an example of compressed wrap coils.
The best way to get tight wraps is to wrap on a die or some sort, drill bit, small screwdriver, nail, etc. This way you can get perfect coils in both diameter and wire spacing. But doing this limits your wick options, or at least makes some options far more difficult. Using cotton wick it's incredibly easy to thread the cotton through the wick after the coils are mounted up.
Using silica is a bit more difficult, as it doesn't expand as much as cotton, and if it's small enough to pull through the coil, it's more likely it won't be tight enough to vape properly. If you work at it you can still thread silica through a coil right, it's just more difficult (at least for me) compared to cotton.
But if you do wrap free-hand you can still get very close wraps by holding a very thin needle inline with the wick, this will give you something stiff enough to get some good wraps going, and once the needle is removed it gives a bit of extra space to avoid choked wicks.
Either way, when wrapping, pull the wire down as if you are going to wrap it on top of the previous wrap, and once you get the hang of it the wrap will snap down tightly next to the previous wrap and you end up with nice tidy tight coils
The RBA section here will have a wealth of info as well, that's where the hardcore RBA junkies hang out