The process of making a bjd custom

Hello! 

It's been some time since I started working with BJD customs, or at least trying to. They're very tricky to deal with, but really funny as well. I've already made a BJD custom of Sakurai Atsushi from Buck-Tick (I can show him here in the future, maybe), but yesterday I bought two cute doll heads and started new projects. I thought it would be fun do set down the whole process here, so here we go. This post will be updated as I will advance with the custom, so by now it will just have some photos and description of the very step of my poor attempts at doll face-ups.

Day 1

First layer of the dolls face-ups. These are Mana-sama (top one) 

and Imai Hisashi (bottom one)

At first, I took off all of the original painting of their faces with a nail polish remover. I don't know if my remover is too week or something like that, but there's always a yellowish stain on the eyebrow's area after I remove the eyebrows and I haven't found a way of getting rid of it.

After cleaning it, I started working with slightly wet colored pencils. You can use them dry if you have good ones, or to sketch, but mine are really common pencils, so they don't work that nicely at plastic without a bit of water. You can use pastels, ink/watercolor and even makeup too if you want. I've used a bit of eyeshadow on imai's eyebrow/eye area, to make a nice permanent shadow there. After making the first layer, I coated everything with matte spray varnish and let it dry till the next day.

Imai before the varnish. The wiry thing on his head is the skeleton of 

his unicorn helmet (that I'll try to make for him in the future)

Mana's head. 

If your doll have shiny eyes that can't be removed, cover them with cotton or papel balls so the varnish won't make them opaque. I've forgot to cover Atsushi's eyes when making his face-up :((

Day 2

Well, here we are again. I left the heads to dry overnight, because the varnish I'v used needs at least 24h to dry completely. On the next night (yesterday), I've made another layer of the face-ups with colored pencils and some white ink (on Mana's eyeshadow), covered the eyes with cotton and coated it all with a new varnish layer. Here's how it looks now:

Mana's head. His eyelids look much better after I added the white paint.

Imai's head. There's something missing, but I don't know exactly what it is.

The thing is, I've  only bought their heads and have 0 money left to buy their little bodies, so I probably won't be able to finish these guys before next month. I have some black hair left from my Acchan bjd, so I could work on Mana's wig, but I think it would be smarter to make the wig with the body on, to get a better idea of ​​the right length etc. Idk.