Miniature heavy board games tend to give you a lot of models for the price. Something like Runewars comes with 48 models, including cavalry and some larger monsters for less than $1 a model, plus a full game, and most of the models have some metallic parts to practice on.

Or something like these 54 mm Dwarf models or orcs.

There is a nice collection of NMM tutorials and resources here to reference.