I've added some extra facial animations into the upcoming update, so the girls smile a bit, etc. I still plan on going in and adding some more animations down the line but these new ones add some nice touches in the mean time.
As far as making characters from scratch, you can do that now by following the tutorials here in the forum, but if it's your first time you might want to wait until I release this new update (very soon now) as it will help make character creation much easier than it is currently.