Painting Miniatures

We bought Talisman a while ago (still haven't played it). It's a fantasy board game that comes with little figurines. They are nicely modelled, but not painted. I've been meaning to paint them for a while, so this week I got brushes, paints, primer, a knife, files, fixative, and a bunch of other random things I needed. I read up a bunch of stuff on painting miniatures, and found a few really good sites and youtube channels. (Just to note, Sebastian at Guild of Harmony is amazing. I want to be able to paint like him some day.)
I did some practise sessions on cheap army men, and it turned out okay. A bit flat, a bit boring.



But I figured why not just move on to the real thing? Well, because I lacked confidence. So I did a mock up in photoshop :)



The mockup actually made things 20million times easier. I had a colour reference to mix colours from (mixing colours from your head is really hard) and a guide on where to put those colours. It could be considered cheating, but I'm willing to try anything to make things easier on myself.
Anyway - here's the final thing. It took me three hours to paint yesterday, and that doesn't include all the time I spent trying (somewhat futilely) to get the lines where the model had come out of its mould off, and priming the plastic so that the paint would stick to it.
What do you think?