This advice is from hot-lead.org: "Some words about materials are in order: for the beginning painter, materials are an expense and you may end up skimping to save money. This is fine, but I find that investing a little now will only pay off later. Brushes are a good example of this: I’ve seen what some of those cheap, ‘miniature-company’ brand brushes look like after a few uses. Go to a good art supply store and buy some better brushes! To begin with get sizes 1, 0, 5/0, and 10/0. That’ll give you a good range of large brushes to cover big surfaces and some small ones for detail work. Nylon bristles seem to last longer when painting miniatures; the yellow kind, called "gold taklon", works best for me because it is strong enough to stand up to the abuse, but soft enough to blend with. I recommend Leow-Corneille (they have a great range, including brushes as small as 18/0!), Windsor-Newton, and Grumbacher brushes." - I recognized the name "Leow-Corneille" (sp?) as the brand of acrylic paint I bought at Wal-green. I do have 10/0, 5/0, and 3/0 brushes for detail work and some larger, cheaper brushes for blocking in color.
From How-to-paint-miniatures.com: "You will need a selection of brushes. I would recommend a size 2, 1, 000, and 5/0. These should suffice for most painting that you will do. Especially with the smaller ones, make sure that the brushes that you are buying come to a good point, with no hairs badly out of place. If, after you have used a brush for a while, an unruly hair begins to stick out, snip that hair off near the ferrel of the brush (the metal part) with a pair of fingernail clippers. Make sure that you only remove the one hair that is out of place.It is important that you take good care of your brushes as they tend to be quite expensive. Make sure that you clean out every bit of paint possible from them after each use with warm, water. You can use some liquid dishsoap to help to clean them out, but lots of water will do the trick usually. NEVER clean up a brush with hot water! The glue that holds the bristles into the brush can melt. This will result in hairs falling out as you paint. The brush will be useless and need to be thrown away. After washing the brush it is very important to form the tip of the brush into its point. A brush could be said to have a memory that it remembers what shape it was when it dried last. Never leave a brush in a container of water to soak. This will bend the bristles and ruin the point, which is very important to get crisp lines and to be able to get into hard to reach places.
You will need a flat size 2 brush and a size 4 flat brush for drybrushing [...] It is my recommendation that these be natural bristled brushes of sable. The round brushes can be either natural or manmade bristles. The natural bristles tend to be softer and work well with blending, where the manmade ones tend to be stiffer, which is good for getting into hard to reach places. Personally, I use natural brushes almost exclusively, a red sable. Many painters will say to use nothing but red sable, but I think that this is a matter of personal preference. I recommend getting a multipack of brushes at a craft store to start with. They will be much cheaper this way over buying them separately. For your very fine brushes though, you may want to hand pick these to get the best points. It is not as important how few bristles that the brush has as it is how good of point that the brush has. One reason that I use red sable is that if you reshape the brush after each washing, you can almost always get a good point out of it. Once nylon brush bristles get bent, no amount of reshaping will get them back to their original state." - the author has some good points about brush maintenance, particularly keeping the ferrule clean and the brush point preserved. I read somewhere to use a dab of vaseline to maintain the tip.
From Squash at BGG: "For my painting, I need 4 brushes: 1 (relatively) larger brush for applying the main blocks of colour, 1 smaller brush for detail work, 1 tiny brush for ultra-fine details such as eyes, and 1 brush specifically designed for drybrushing. Any hobby store should have what you need. I went with overpriced Games Workshop brushes, but I'm 'fraid they're rather frayed after my 4 painting projects, so now I'm thinking it might simply be better to purchase cheap brushes and replace them more frequently. But I don't really know much about brushes or the types of hair of which they're made." - the alternative position, to get cheap brushes and replace them often. I suppose it depends on how much painting you intend to do; if you're not making a long commitment, maybe cheap is the way to go.
From hot-lead.org: "I use acrylic paints exclusively for miniature painting since they are pretty much non-toxic, clean up with water, and dry quickly. Some painters prefer oil or enamel-based paints for their blending ease, but they can take a long time to dry and require solvent-based thinners (turpentine, etc.). I prefer Ral Partha acrylics over all the other gaming-company brands of paint (The Armory, Chessex, Citadel, etc.). They’re pre-thinned (so they flow well and blend well), have a wide range of colors and come in the best-sealing plastic paint bottles I’ve ever seen (I’ve rarely had these paints dry out on me). You can also use acrylic craft paints (such as Decoart, Ceramcoat, etc.), which are inexpensive and have an even wider range of colors. Be prepared to have a large storage container to keep them in, though, as they have tall bottles. Artists' acrylics in tubes (Liquitex, Windsor Newton, etc.) are great paints also, but are a little too thick to use on figures, though the Liquitex paints in the flip-top jars are thinner in viscosity and work fine.
The brands I’d caution you against are Citadel paints, which can be rather watery in consistency, with resulting coverage problems, and Polly-S Fantasy paints, which are difficult to blend with due to their chalkiness and have a real problem with drying out in the bottle! [I recently heard that Polly-S is now no longer being produced, so they won’t be an issue…] That said, however, I have to say that Polly-S had the best metallic acrylics for miniature painting; the metal flakes are extremely fine and cover in one coat! Though Polly-S is now defunct, Floquil (the parent company) still makes most of the metal colors in their new ‘Polly-Scale’ military acrylics line." - well, I've got acrylics in tubes so I will have to learn how to thin it. Is plain water okay?
From How-to-paint-miniatures.com: "I recommend acrylic paints, the kind found in ladies' craft stores. They clean up and thin easily with warm water. One can clean them up with mild liquid dish soap as well. They tend to be smooth and often somewhat thinner than enamels. They also tend to be less opaque than enamels. The color that you base coat with determines to large degree the warmth or coolness of the paint applied over it.
Many companies sell packs of paint six or eight at a time aimed at miniatures painting. I prefer to buy exactly the colors that I feel that I will use most. Also, the multipacks of paints cost more than women's craft paints. The colors that you may want to buy from a miniatures company are gold and silver, even if you pay more for them. Some craft paints do a poor job with metallics, though they will have many colors that are often not available from miniatures companies. Cheaper metallics can sometimes have coarser metallic particles and don't spread or dry evenly in some cases.
I have various kinds of paints available in tubes, squeeze bottles, and pots. For dispensing paints, I dislike the little pots of paint, as it is easy to get cross-contamination of color from one pot to the other. The squeeze tubes or squeeze bottles allow one to dispense exactly the amount of paint onto your pallet. The open pots can dry out or get thicker over time, since one most often uses the paint right out of the pot.
The colors of paint that I recommend purchasing to start with are flesh, red, yellow, blue, brown, black, white, silver, and gold. You will eventually want to invest in the secondary colors: green, purple, and orange. You can get really great effects with pearlescent white added to other colors. If you will be doing blending, you will want to purchase some drying retardant, sometimes known as "extender". When blending, this keeps the paint from drying as rapidly while you apply colors progressively closer to the target color."
hot-lead.org: "You're going to need a pallette, too. Inexpensive, plastic ones are available at hobby or art stores, but if you find yourself painting often, you may want to invest in one of the ceramic palettes made for Japanese ink painting ('Sumi'). This white-porcelain palette cleans up in a snap with just some warm water and the paints don’t stain the ceramic, unlike with a plastic palette. At around $10 it's an option, but a good one in my book."
how-to-paint-miniatures.com: "You will need to buy a palette, which is a metal or plastic plate with concave areas for mixing paint. An old plate can be used for this if desired. Recently I have moved from traditional palettes to putting the paint that I use directly onto a piece of white shower board that I cut to fit the area in which I paint. I don't run out of room for the paints that I use (my plastic palettes only had 6 or 12 indentaions for paint). This works well for cleanup as well, since with the acrylic paints that I use, the paint comes off easily when it dries with just my thumbnail. This saves trips to the sink to clean one's palettes. The shower board also gives you a lot or room for mixing paints. With the white background, you can more easily see what the color will look like when on a white basecoat of paint than with a metal or other type of palette. Whichever pallet that you choose, I recommend that it be as bright a white as possible if you will be using white as your base coat. Ideally the palette should be the color of the base coat that you normally use, so that what you see on the palette when mixing colors is the same thing you will see when the paint is applied to your miniatures. When applying most paints, the color that you see is limited in brightness to what it is painted on,or primed with. " - well, I have grey primer and a black palette, so too bad for me.
Squash at BGG: "Don't paint directly out of your pots. Paint-pot painting is not permissible - purchasing a plastic palette is preferable. You will dry out your paints if you paint out of your pots. I went to a dollar store and purchased a plastic palette for a buck. It's a bit of a pain to clean dry paint out of all those little wells afterwards, so next time I might cover it with a layer of clear plastic wrap and simply peal it off when I'm finished. Or you could get really fancy and go with the following advice that I was given: "Never apply paint directly from a paint container. Instead, use a 'wet pallete', which is just a shallow, large plastic container with a lid. In the container goes a layer of ordinary household sponges (preferably neutral coloured if available). On top of this goes some blotting paper and then a layer of cooking/silicone paper. Then place a small amount of water at the some water at the bottom of the container enough to reach half way up the sponges. This should dampen the silicone paper, which is semi-permeable. You can then put your paints onto the silicone paper, which will keep your acrylic paints from drying too quickly. It is also an excellent base for mixing colours." - this seems like a neat idea, but there is no way I'm committing the time and trouble to make this work.
hot-lead.org: While you’re at the art store, buy some kind of brush cleaner. Two popular kinds are "The Masters" brush cleaner (its a paste that comes in small, tan tubs) and Grumbacher Brush Soap (a round, green bar). A good cleaner is indispensable for keeping your brushes clean and making them last longer! You don't have to use these if you can;t afford them - use some regular soap, just use something! Whatever you use, the procedure's the same: just wet the brush under some running water, swirl it in the cleaner, rub the brush gently in your palm until the cleaner suds up, and rinse with some clean water. A word of caution, though - with the tiny brushes we use in miniature painting, take care not to get too much brush cleaner or paint into the ferrule (the metal band holding the bristles together)! If too much material gets lodged there and dries up, the bristles will begin fanning out after use and ruin the brush. Try to put paint only on the tip of the brush when painting, to avoid this.
How-to-paint-miniatures.com "You will need some type of container to hold water (or paint thinner, if you are using non-water-based enamels) to wash your brushes in as you go. I use a quart-sized canning jar, as it is heavy and won't tip over as easily as a plastic cup. Dumping an entire glass of water with paint in it onto your carpet can make you downright unpopular at your house for a while to come (or at least that has been my experience). Also a couple of paper towels or napkins are necessary to keep close at hand for drying your brush after washing it and for drybrush techniques.