Equipment

You don't need a lot of things to start, the main point is the material quality. First of all we speak of the brushes, being a precision job good quality brushes are required, with a sharp point. Look at the point of the dry brushes, no hair must be seen out place: discard immediately the brushes that don't have a perfect point.

The sable brushes is surely the best but they is also the most expensive. To begin you can use some brushes in synthetic material that are less expensive and give good results however.
I personally use Toray synthetic brushes (brand Bavaria).

The brushes dimension is encoded by numbers (for instance 5, 1, 00, 5/0), the smallest number show the smallest point....  unfortunately a standard chart doesn't exist and therefore the only solution is to compare them.

The necessary brushes to begin should be:
- a pair of greater brushes (between 3 and 0) to prime and for the widest zones
- two or three middle brushes (between 00 and 5/0) for the smallest areas
- one or two small brushes (between 10/0 and 20/0) for the details
All these brushes are to choose between those with the round point, a pair of brushes of great dimensions and the flat point are useful for the
drybrushing technique that we will discuss later.

Other essential tools are some modeling cutters (xacto knifes), then you can add a set of thin files, some sandpaper and a clipper.
These will serve for polishing up the miniature from all the lines of metal caused by the mould or from imperfections of the metal. When you will be more experts they will be useful to modify the miniatures and add details (for instance a third arm to a Champion of Chaos).
A modeling drill and a small saw with some thin blades are less essential but however useful.

To assembly the multi part miniatures is necessary some proper glue (super glue or two part epoxy) and some modeling putty for the retouches.

You will need  a container or two for water or the solvent, a container to mix the colors and some rags or napkins of paper to clean the brushes.

The working area must be wide enough to contain everything is necessary, protected from color stains and well illuminated.

Colors

The colors currently used for the miniatures are of two types: enamels and acrylic. The first ones is oil based or use synthetic solvents, the seconds are water based.
The advantages of the seconds are evident because they don't need particular solvents and dry in few minutes.
I use acrylic colors, bought in fine arts shops, I have never had problems to use them for the miniatures, the colors exist however (acrylic or enamels) of all the greatest modeling brands and are used by the greatest part of the miniaturists.
To begin: white, black, blue, yellow, red, flesh, green and brown; mixing these colors you can create almost every miniatures. Subsequently you can buy other colors to not have to look for the correct mixture and speed up your work, besides the quoted ones I also have a rotten green, a reddish brown, a violet and a blue.
Metallic colors are rather different, in this case the specific miniatures colors are better then fine arts ones because, besides the specific formula you can find many particular colors.
To begin: gold and silver; subsequently you can be add the colors that you mostly use (copper, mithril, gunmetal...).

Inks the can be used for the outlining technique, shading and blending. These inks, as for the colors, can be specific for miniatures or simple inks bought in fine arts shops.
To begin: black, brown, red; the other inks will depend on the miniatures that you will paint... in every case you can use these three colors for the 90% of the jobs.