Hiya. I\'m impressed with your drive to improve. Try not to be too hard on yourself, though, and try to have a little fun with it. It definitely is possible to make big strides in technique, but remember there\'s usually a trade-off. MagnaTrax is fantastic, but I believe it took 100 some hours to paint. If you look at my gallery, you\'ll see how far I\'ve come in 3 years using guides and advice from CMON and other places, but my gallery includes literally every miniature I\'ve ever painted - I only have one speed/quality level, and I\'m not very practiced at the basic techniques of drybrushing and washing. These are some thoughts I had on your specific problems.
Brushes. I do think a high quality natural hair brush helps a lot with layering. The W&N brushes everyone recommends come in both round point and miniature round point. The main difference is the length of the bristles, which is shorter on the miniature, but the miniature also have a smaller diameter. I think most people use the regular round point, but there are a few who like the miniature. I like the regular better, myself, particularly for layering. If you have trouble dotting eyes, the miniature 3/0 is as small as is practical in a brush. A lot of people say they can dot eyes with a W&N 1 or at least a 0. Maybe my 0 is crummy (and I am thinking of trying another just in case), or maybe I\'m just not as talented, but I dot eyes with the miniature 3/0, and I do a lot of my layering with the regular 2/0 and 3/0, using the 0 only on fairly large areas. If you can afford it, I\'d recommend getting the 0, 2/0 and 3/0. If you buy good brushes, it\'s also worth buying tools to take care of them well. The Masters, Pink Soap and W&N Brush Cleaner are all frequently recommended and that same store you linked to should sell at least one of them.
Streaky base coat. It sounds like you\'re thinning your paint, but just in case, even paint for base coats should be thinned a little. Another problem people sometimes have is that minerals in hard water can add a little chalkiness sometimes. You might try using distilled water (which is pretty cheap) and see if that helps. Future adds a little shine and some paints are shinier than others. It\'s also possible streakiness in the base coat is you seeing different areas reflecting light differently. You could do a test base coat and spray it with Dullcote and see if it still looks streaky.
Gray scale. Black, white and gray scale are harder to layer in my experience. I think that\'s one reason non-metallic metal is so difficult to get started with. White and many other light colour paints are often much chalkier than darker colours. They are also often much stronger. So they often need a ton more dilution than other colours and using really thin and more layers, and even then there\'s a lot of going back and forth glazing out layer marks and streaks, then building the highlights back up, then glazing again and so on. You might try starting with a light gray or white and layering down with thin layers of your darker colours and see if that approach helps. Natural colours like greens, browns and so on are often much more forgiving to work with. (Red can be hard, and also often works better starting with one of the lighter tones and working down into your shadows.)
Inorganic, flat surfaces. I think flat surfaces and inorganic objects are less forgiving - demanding smoother blends and as much perfection as possible. I hear a lot of people say painters of tanks and the like rarely get enough credit for skilled paint jobs as people who don\'t paint those things don\'t recognize the difficulties. And we\'re generally used to industrial produced items looking perfectly smooth and symmetrical in a way that\'s hard for a fallible human to duplicate with paint.
So my recommendation would be to go find a nice organic miniature and try using some natural colours on it, and see if you have as much trouble as you\'re having with this figure. It seems like you\'ve got the general idea of the technique down, it may just be that you need to practice a little more with figures and colours that are a little more forgiving. I\'ve heard people who teach painting say one of the hardest things for people to get is thinning ratios. If the teacher sets up the paint, the students can often paint results well beyond what they get setting up the paint on their own. So that\'s one of the things it takes a while to get experience at, and different paints, different colours, different additives like Future vs. flow improve, different humidities on a given day, all of that has an effect. There\'s a nice article on thinning here (http://www.reapermini.com/TheCraft/15), and another about thinning and use of additives here (http://www.darkvine.com/articles/thinproblem.htm). The best tutorial on painting layers with acrylics that I know of is here (http://www.ttfxmedia.com/vallejo/cgi-bin/_modelis.asp?p1=ing&p2=modelcolortecnicas), and it includes exercises you can do to practice your techniques.
