Practice
TL;DR Toy Plastic Soliders are excellent to practice painting techniques on to see how fully finished models will look 👍 Ive seen many different post on other platforms of people showing off painting techniques on different items (Paper, plastic spoons, spare mini parts etc) and I know that not everyone has those or likes to use those items for practice. I have my own person preferance as seen above. Bases make great practice material no matter the technique I wanted to practice rust some years back and used some necromunda bases to try figure out how to sell the effect. The big one those is toy soliders the ones that come in bags of 100 that you could pick up from a corner shop or toy shop for pocket change. To this day there still availble and arent too expensive. Because they are posed with guns or in the above case medieval weapons you can try everything from lighting, skin tones, nmm weathering... the list is endless. I find it helps with trying new techniques out on something more tangible than a spoon or spare parts because you can paint the full solider up to see how something youre trying looks against other techniques/ a fully finished model. Hope this helps some people and it gets adopted by those who find it intresting.