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Does it work? Or are there any issues?

The artists paints are usually in paste form.
So thinning is needed. And when those paints are tjinned properly for painting, they don't cover as well.
Save yourself the hassle. Buy proper miniature paint..
My two cents..

It could be done, but not ideal. They work fine with terrain stuff, though.

I see thanks. My wife used to paint as a hobby and now she wants to get back into it so we were wondering if we could share paints.

Its definitely popssible to use them for terrain, particularly boards. Anything with fine detail though... I probably wouldnt want to risk it.

I would say; try it out on a test model (i've done it before and its works fine, but these where professional acrylics). So if you use the cheap ones and it works for you, good for you and your wife because this can save you some money.

But I also recommend buying the GW paints or something similar because they work really well and you are able to get loads of different colors and special paints like washes or metallic paints that you can use again and again and will stay consistent over and over. Mixing your own colors from a couple basic acrylics from another brand might works fine on single models... but will not work well if you want to do a themed army and are looking for consistency in colors. Also if you have to stop and continue working on a model lets say a few weeks later you know that the color you where working with will still be exactly the same.

They are perfectly fine for painting; the following was painted using craft paints alone:





EDIT: Make sure to use a wet pallette and thin them down to a workable consistency/flow, that's all there is to it. Premium craft acrylics like FolkArt Artist's Pigment have finer and well concentrated pigment that gets the job done quite well for basecoats. For layering, anything should work. Ron Saikowski (sp?) of From The Warp used to use craft paints (Apple Barrel, Americana etc.) all the time and he was a great artist (and the man who made me realize paying premium for branded paint is pointless..).

Canvas paints, even acrylic ones, are designed so that they have body -- you WANT to be able to leave paint volume and brush strokes onto canvas, because that's part of the artwork. On canvas, you want a painting, not a photograph.

Miniature paints are designed to generate as little volume as possible, so that once the water evaporates, slightly uneven application will still appear without brushstrokes ("Self-levelling").

One issue is that you will probably waste quite a bit of paint, since the minimum amount of canvas paint you can squeeze out of a tube, once you dilute it, is quite large. and way more than you'd need just to paint a gemstone, or eyes, or a pistol.

Can you use water-based acrylic in tubes on models? Of course. You can also use oil paints (some people use oil to wet blend flat surfaces like weapons, because it's just easier), or watercolors, too. It's just a little less ideal, you have to work harder to get the same result, and you probably won't be able to achieve as good a final product as your best effort would be with the paints that are the easiest to use.