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Is it a good idea to buy lots of cheap figurine sets, for painting practice?

When you're done with them, can you use them in games?

i.e. the Dark Angels from 'Dark Vengeance'

Depending on your preferred army and resources you can pretty much pick up a whole army from just a few different eBay auctions much much cheaper than buying elsewhere.

If you are careful you can also strip the minis again if you are not happy and if your painting improves.

So yeah it is a good idea and you save money to boot.

If you're looking for cheap models to practice on, go to the dollar store and pick up a pack of cheap green armymen. They are totally disposable and far cheaper than anything you will find on ebay.

 Vulcan wrote:
If you're looking for cheap models to practice on, go to the dollar store and pick up a pack of cheap green armymen. They are totally disposable and far cheaper than anything you will find on ebay.

This too. Build up brush control and muscle memory on disposable grunts.

When I was in middle school many years ago the University of New Orleans had these after school programs for kids. One of them was a class on role-playing and miniature wargames, strange as it sounds.

Anyhow, when the professor was teaching us how to paint miniatures, he started by having us paint little, oddly shaped bits of wood with lots of different angles. I had completely forgotten about it until I read your post, but thinking back, it was a really cheap way to learn brush control. He would have us paint each face a different color.

Another option would be to pick up some cheaper miniatures that can represent things you might use in your games, or even just bits you will use for scenery or terrain. You could pick up some Pegasus farm animals, for example. That way, when you practice painting you will at least have something that you have a use for when you are done.

Heck it's my M. O. to buy cheap miniatures and use them in my games. My target price for figs is a buck each (though there are exceptions of course) for line figs and 2-5 for characters etc. Purple Power is your friend at these prices.

If you're talking super cheap for practice...
I'd avoid the toy army men as they haven't got enough detail to really be good options. However, EM4 has a whole range of cheap plastic miniatures in sci-fi, post apoc and fantasy genres.
http://www.em4miniatures.com/acatalog/FANTASY.html

The cheapest are their plastic orcs and dwarves that were part of the original "fantasy rules" boxed set and are now sold separately and in batches of 50.
Pretty nice figs for 32 cents (25 cents if you buy in bulk) a piece!

Thanks for all the feedback guys! I'm going down that path right now!

Oohh... my Dark Vengeance Unforgiven has arrived... and I'm starting on my first Tac Marine now... I also have an additional Assault Squad to work on later on... :-)

I got more than half of my Tyranid Army -- Hive Fleet Kielbasa -- as second hand models off eBay.

It's a great way to pick up cheap models are long as you are good at paint stripping and fixing up (which is easy with Nids.)

You could just buy cheaper models than GW. Plenty of nanufacturers offer two or three times the models for the money GW asks, especially historical ranges.