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Your brushes are your best friends. Put them upright with the tips pointing upward in an empty glass (see picture), and don't use the brush-ends to stir paints. Use toothpicks for that. Also, use the right brush for the right job. It's not for nothing that they've made especially designed drybrushes.
Use a place with plenty of light, prefarably from outside but a couple of lamps will do as well. Also, make sure you cover the space you're working with old newspapers at least. Games Workshop has a great paintstation designed just for this purpose.
Your mini's got relief. But the edges and so are too small to create a shadow effect by the light. You can do a couple of things here: Drybrushing, when you whipe off almost all paint from the tip of your brush and then lightly go over the parts you want to paint; inkwashing, where you use (preferably thinned down) ink which flows in the recesses creating natural shadows, and highlighting, where you pick out higher areas with a brighter colour by hand.
Water is fairly easy to do. You can use either PVA glue for water effects, or Games Workshop's Water Effect.
When you mix paints, make sure you write down how much of each colour you've used, or better yet, paint them on a piece of paper or cardboard, so you can reproduce the colour later.
As a mixing palette, you can use almost anything. I've got a plastic painter's palette for it, but before that I used an old dish.
When you're not sure about something, try it out first, on a miniature that you paint over afterwards, or, if it's an emblem of some sorts, on your palette. When painting small emblems, it's good to know that you can paint the background on the emblem. See the pic for more info on that one.
The answer to this is simple. The best paints for painting these miniatures are the Citadel paints that can be bought from Games Workshop. The best part is: they're water-based, so you can thin them down with water and wash your brushes in water. They also dry almost instantly (inks a little longer, but that can be expected). And they have really cool names, like Skull White and Goblin Green for example.
Sometimes, when painting small details, it's easier to hold the brush still and move the miniature. Also, put your elbows on the table/desk you work at and hold both hands together for extra support.
When you have so many paint pots that you can't put them all in a row to read the names, simply put a dot of paint on the centre of the lid so you can see what colour it is. Use a white circle for Chaos Black, and put a white dot on all the inks, then paint it over with the colour of the ink.
