Faceups I need advice to make an okay face up

I usually use 2 halves of a cosmetic sponge per faceup, just keep cutting off dirty bits. It's cheaper to get them in bulk online for this, too.

Try dabbing your brush off on a piece of paper towel before you bring it to the face - the brush shouldn't be completely saturated, it should be nearly dry when painting small hairs like lashes and brows. You can practice the strokes on paper first, it takes a bit of time to get it right but it will help loads.

 

Thank you for these tips!

 

I also use high flow acrylics from time to time to do eyelashes and usually the brush you use can effect the outcome. I use a small 0/20 to help create those fine lashes. I also recommend to use gouache paints since you can wipe away mistakes more easily since they’re water based.
Just keep practicing! We all start somewhere!

 

I have extremely shaky hands, since I was young, a thing I didn't know about until I discovered BJD back in the dark ages. I learned that there are days that are better, and days that are worse, for my unsteady hands. However, placing your arms on a steady flat surface, mostly your elbows, and holding your main-painting hand against the hand that's holding your part to be painted, helps a lot. It gives you a steadier hand because you move with your piece, that's to be painted on. Not so easy when painting tiny hair strokes, but better than nothing.

I am a traditionally trained artist, since I could barely speak, so I never really thought about using mediums other than water on canvas. However, when using acrylic paints, mediums do make a huge difference in how your paint flows and sticks to the surface (more so on plastic, like these dolls). If you are not using pastel to shade the brows in, before you use paint for hair stokes, I strongly suggest you look up a tutorial for repainting 1:6 action figures. They only use paint for doing the whole face, and you really only need paint and mediums to do so -- even on BJD, you can use only just paint. You can also wipe away, without worrying about damaging anything, because there's nothing under to get damaged. If you are going to use pastels, then you can try looking for a BJD repainting tutorial. Hope that helps, and good luck! (:

 

You may just need to practice your brush technique more. A 20/0 brush is usually plenty thin enough, but no brush creates a thin line if you use it too heavy handed. Try to make sure that just the tip touches the doll head and use a quick flicking motion to get light tapered lines.
Getting the right amount of paint on the brush is also important. Don't over dip the brush, or the paint will clog and clump up the bristles, making uneven lines and causing wear on the brush.
It takes some practice to do well and even more so on a three dimensional surface like a doll head. You can also practice on the head cap, the smooth surface is a good middle ground between practicing on paper and painting the detailed face. And as a bonus it much easier and faster to clean sealant off the smooth head cap when you want to start over.

What methods do you currently use for cleaning sponges? I don't use sponges for sealants, but I use them for dry brushing and I have some I've been using for a very long time.
This is roughly how I do it for acrylic paints, it should work similarly enough for water based acrylic varnishes and mediums:
When I want to put a sponge down for long enough that the paint may dry out in it, I soak it in water first. This keeps the paint from setting.
If I need to do another coat, I get another sponge.
When I'm ready to clean up after the paint session I run warm water through the sponge and gently squeeze it until no more paint comes out. Then I put it aside to dry. It will take a while to dry, so don't expect to be able to use the same sponge again until the next day.
I have had a few latex sponges that crumbled and disintegrated quickly, but better quality ones can be cleaned many times before starting to wear out.
Avoid wringing or squeezing harshly, as that will make the sponge break down faster.
Don't allow paint or varnish to completely dry in the sponge or it will be in there forever, making the sponge useless.

 

Oh! I use the liquitex + makeup sponge technique as well, I just soak them in water after finishing a layer and gently squeezing out the excess water, which if I don't forget to do, tends to keep the sponges useable for as long as I keep remembering to wash them! I've have found that water by itself does do a pretty good job of taking care of the sealant so that the sponges don't go hard, and so far haven't noticed it messing with the next round of sealant, using both pastels and watercolor pencils for the faceup itself.

 

A lot of people have given pretty good advice, but the biggest thing is to do it. You can watch a thousand videos, but it won't beat good ol practice. Like, your placement looks correct, it's just the physical skill of your hands.

Even a cheap sketchbook should provide similar tooth to how sealant works and go to town. Experiment with different paint, like I use golden paints cause they carry more pigment but student grade like liquitex will carry less pigment, and so how they will "feel" is different. The more you do it, the more feel you get and the more you can tell if you need to dab some off the brush first. As you experiment and mess up, you'll learn what's a wrong angle, too much pressure, ECT.Going straight to dolls might be giving you a little bit of the yips, so once you get your jitters out, you also might feel more confident in your strokes.

Can't wait to see what you do next

 

What's helping me greatly these days with line work is using the very thin, snappy, nail art liner brushes, they give amazingly thin line results when used with very light, barely-touching-the-doll-face, quick little strokes.
I also am now using water color ink instead of watercolor tubes or liquitex acrylics. I do have to make sure to lay down some unsealed (usually white) pastel powder in the area where I will be making my lines, to help the ink go on smoothly. When the ink is dry, the unsealed white pastel is easily blown off the face again (or dusted off by lightly brushing with a shader brush)

Even with the ink consistency, I still add a drop or water to dilute the strength of the pigments. I then load my tiny liner nail art brush with some of the diluted ink, make a line stroke (or two) on a paper first to remove excess paint, then move on to stroking a few lines onto the face. Reload the brush and repeat. The water color ink is also very easily removable again if you are not happy with your lines and want to retry. Until you seal them, obviously.

 

I'm planning to use sponge + matte varnish as a sealant in some future faceup attempts, potentially, so this is helpful. I've only used it for blushing or painting body parts, and didn't run into as much pastel smudging as you did, which is curious. Maybe it is the brand and qualities of the pastel itself.

Regarding the faceups, one suggestion I may make is to do more pastel layers and build up the color (including using different hues based on the region of the face). I've noticed that it made a difference in making my faceups look more 'professional'. I usually do most of the pastel layers first before moving onto linework

 

Something that I've found helpful for painting eyebrows is to block them in with pastels first. If you are going for simplicity or painting a very small head, sometimes that is enough on it's own.

If you want to add individual hairs, then make sure the pastel base is well sealed and add hairs a few at a time using a brush and heavily diluted paint (test it on a similar surface first, to get the right consistency). You want these hairs to be very thin and they don't need to be completely opaque. Since they are painted on top of the pastel, they just add a bit of texture and depth.
If you use water colors, you can't overlap hairs without sealing between, or you may reactivate the paint and distort the fine lines. Instead, do just a few hairs at a time between seals. You can also very slightly change color between passes to get even more depth.
If you are using acrylics for the line work you don't need to seal between passes, just make sure to wait until the previous pass is dry.
The pastel underneath works like the shadow that the hairs cast on the skin beneath and ties everything together. This means you usually don't need that many individual hairs to fill in the eyebrow and it's much easier to maintain shape and placement.

You can use a similar trick for eyelashes.
Especially lower lashes can benefit from a bit of subtle shading underneath. It makes them look more like actual lashes and less like lines on the skin. Getting the shading down before the line work also provides you with a bit of a paint guide and can help keeping things even and symmetrical.