@dekana - the world of paint and tools is potentially a bit confusticating. My advice would be: don't sweat it.
Tool-wise all you need is a nice sharp hobby knife with replaceable blades, a pair of clippers (for sprue removal) and a file or two for getting rid of mould lines and you should be fine. Plastic glue is a must, and superglue is helpful, altho not necessary if youre going all-plastic.
paint: hmmn. wide wide world here. Broadly speaking Games Workshop, Vallejo, Army Painter, P3 (Privateer Press) and Reaper all do very, very similar lines. The colours vary, but all are good, and can be either slapped on or laboured over painstakingly. They're also all intermixable, so by all means use a GW blue, highlighted with a P3 pale blue and shaded with a Reaper dark blue. I wouldn't recommend a paint set, unless it was a small one (6-10 paints or so) as most big sets wil contain a whole passel of colours that will just sit there and dry out cos you never need em.
Some points to note about paint lines are:
GW is expensive compared to others. Compare ml per pot and cost per pot.
Vallejo do 3 lines (Model Air, Game Colour and Model Colour). VMA is for airbrushing, VGC is for "fantasy" minis and VMC is for "historical". That said, although the general consensus is that VGC is a bit sub-par compared to the others, I've never noticed a difference.
Reaper do their paints in triads, allowing for easy highlighting/shading (eg. flesh, pale flesh, dark flesh). I've never used em, but lots of folks like em.
P3 do some colours that other companies dont. Coal Black and Umbral Umber spring to mind.
You mentioned Tamiya: Their spray cans are very useful for undercoats (go light on these) but their pots of paint are not much good for brush painting. Airbrush, theyre good, but regular hairy brush they're much too thin. The exception is Tamiya Clear Red, Clear Green and Smoke. These are awesome useful paints for blood, goo and oil effects.
Other stuff for minis:
Some sand, flock and grass tufts will make your bases look a heap better than plain black. Basing is important. (<-- this is just my opinion. Others may disagree...)
Green stuff is handy. Milliput is also very good, although different to GS.
If you want more info on painting than any sane man could need, check Cool Mini or Not. The forums are a great place to get advice on all levels of painting, altho bear in mind that most folks on there paint for painting's sake, not for gaming (i.e. spending a month on a single mini is totally normal there.)
Hope that helps.
ps yes I know he didnt ask for advice, but here it is anyway. Just trying to be helpful
