Hello! New to the BJD Community!

Since you said you wanna learn how to do faceups (me too) I recommend finding a cheap head secondhand to practice on! It can give you a lot more confidence when it's low stakes

 

Welcome to the hobby, and I hope your journey is so fun filled with beautiful dolls.
Try to do your own faceup, don't ever get disgorged if you don't like the result, it's a learning process and trust me it's so worth it

Take your time to choose what you want, ask learn and have fun!!

 

Welcome to the hobby. I always recommend people new to hobby check out discussion threads as well as photo gallery. Esp when you know who you are looking for. As you can get advice from just people talking about the particular doll or company. Be careful how you put in certain phrases like looking to buy or want to buy. That is not allowed in discussion. It's better that you say, doing some research on.... or I would love to know more and see photos of.... Posts get your chance into marketplace faster, but don't be in a hurry, save up and be wary of to good to be true deals on any doll esp if it says the seller on ebay is in China. Recasts are not only bad for the hobby and artists that work hard to create their dolls, but it will get you removed from DOA if you post them. Look at company websites and join as a member, it should be free, and you can earn points with each purchase. Good luck I have been in hobby myself for 18 years and it's been quite the time.

 

Hello and welcome to DoA! That's amazing that you are planning on making BJDs into your OCs. Please share your project/journey with us. I just Googled your Edward from Gem of Doll and he is an amazing first doll to start off with so congratulations!

If you are going to do face-ups and body blushing and are completely new to it, be sure to do proper PPEs and such and never do face-ups in a room where small children, pets, or other living things live and breath in as an FYI. Resin poisoning is no joke and getting resin/chalk/toxic materials lung is pretty bad. Speaking from secondhand experience of being exposed to such things when my bestie did face-ups and body blushing for a little while.

Also, agreeing with the others of getting a secondhand (but not recast) sculpts to practice on. Don't want to mess up your gorgeous Edward's face from too many practice runs as your are perfecting your technique. There's a lot of threads on face-ups and body blushing that exist already on DoA so all you just have to do is pour through all the different resources on here. Same with clothing creations as there are so many talented people here that not only make custom outfits for their dolls but also have been willing to share patterns for free sometimes.

You're going to do great here and it'll be exciting to see how your Edward gets transformed into your OC character. Take care, and have lots of fun!