Wow, straight back in there, you must be as bored as I am today! You can probably find all the painting advice you need on the GW web pages and here. If you want a handy guide to always have by you it is OK, it\'s how I learnt, but if there was a site like CMON around when I started I probably wouldn\'t have needed the guide so much.
And yeah, it is an awful lot of figures. You may well be in the same situation sooner than you expect if you aren\'t careful. Mini collecting is a terrible curse!