I’m late to the party here, so I can mostly only echo what others have said. What you’ve done looks fine to me. And I don’t mean “for a first mini”. There’s plenty of folks who’d be quite happy to put that on the tabletop (including me.)
Using pale grey in lieu of white is solid advice. Certain colours just don’t play well (white, yellow and red being the main culprits) and so it helps a lot if you’re putting them over a colour which is similar-ish. For example, put yellow over a warm ochre, and red over a orange-brown. White goes over basically any really pale color you have, with sand and grey being the most common. Later on you can dick about with what kind of white you prefer (eg a warm, sandy white, or a cool blue-grey white, or whatever) but for now just “white-adjacent” is where you want to be. Note that all of the above will necessitate multiple layers of paint, and so (as Dave pointed out) keeping your layers thin is very important. If the paint is thinned enough, your multiple thin coats will dry about as fast as one thick coat, so it doesn’t gain you any time benefit to paint using thick paint, and you risk losing detail and adding visible brush strokes.
Overall, though, your paint placement is good. You said you made some mistakes then fixed them. Well done - you have discovered the secret of awesome painters the world over
One thing I’m kind of keen to preach about is not being tied to any given manufacturer or shade of paint. GW, Vallejo, scale 75, P3 and others are all very comparable in terms of quality, with the only differentiator being how much paint you get for your buck. They all mix together quite happily, and each range has some unique colors or characteristics that sets it apart. The exception is Tamiya, which you’ll see a lot in hobby stores here. It’s good paint, but uses a different base to the other ones I listed, and is mostly intended for airbrushing. It certainly has its uses, but don’t mix it with the other brands or you’ll get an icky mess.
Which brings me to my last point - get used to mixing your own colours. It’ll serve you well in the long run. By all means keep a notepad of what colors went on which minis (this is useful for painting armies, that you might come back to a year or more later and think “what blue was that again?”) but don’t feel tied to any single shade or tone. The human eye is a fine thing, but the difference between GW Ultramarine blue and some-other-blue-I-eyeball’d-and-mixed-myself is really hard to discern.
In order to get comfy with mixing, I’d highly, highly recommend a wet palette. You’ll need a plastic tray (like you get meat on at the supermarket, assuming you clean the hell out of it. Ferrero roche trays are also perfect, and conveniently come with chocolates in em, too
). A shallow Tupperware would be fine, too, but has less yum-factor
So, take the plastic tray, put a folded paper towel in the bottom of it, and add enough water to make it pretty wet without dripping everywhere. Put a layer of unwaxed baking sheet on this paper towel. This is your mixing surface. You can put little blobs of paint on this and mix em as you see fit. I find adding a small pool of water in the corner of the palette is handy for mixing, too. This set up encourages mixing colors, experimenting with gradations, and general experimentation. I honestly can’t recommend it enough - it’s a real game changer. (Btw, the reason it’s good is that then baking sheet draws water from the kitchen paper as your paint evaporates, thus keeping the paint wet for days at a time. It’s awesome. But don’t leave it for days at a time in the summer. Not in this country. I did that once. Never again
)
Those technical points aside, I’d say for your next step you could consider adding some shading and/or highlighting. There’s an easy way to do this, or the hard way.
The easy way (which I do recommend) is using washes. Either buy some citadel contrast paint or mix some inks with a bit of water, and carefully (avoiding excess) paint it over the base color. It will settle in the recesses, and as it dries leave a gradated shadowed area in those recesses. You can then go back with either your base color or even a lighter shade and put some highlights on the most-sticky-outy-bits (knee pads, shoulder pads, knuckles, face). This will result in a very respectable table top mini.
Or there’s the hard way.
*edit* which I’m not going to talk about. Honestly, I wrote a couple paragraphs on the topic, but rereading them it’s clear that it’d be trying to run before we can walk. So, let’s just summarize the hard way by saying “spend an eternity placing every shadow and highlight manually” and leave it at that for now. We can come back to this later, if you can be bothered
So aye - mini number 1 is looking pretty damn good, in my opinion. The next thing to consider is shadows and highlights. Good luck, and keep on painting
-Dave (yes, I am also called Dave. He’s the other one.)
Ps - you’ve probably noticed by now I tend towards very wordy responses. Feel free to ignore em if they get boring
) 