BuddyPress.org

I am a bit confused about 1 thing. Do I create a child theme with the theme buddypress installs with or create a parent theme to make child themes from in the future. I am looking to change colors, layout (collumns) bg image and things like that. Something I read made it sound like any wordpress theme can be the parent, is this correct? I am assuming that using a standard wordpress theme would require adding code from the default theme. Is this correct? I just want to make sure I am understanding this before I try to jump in and work because in the begining I don’t think I was. Thank you,

Greg