Acryl-Thicccs: Old-school Formula for a New Age?

GamingTrend recently had the opportunity to review Monument Hobbies’ Expert Artist Acrylics and the AK Interactive Artist Dense Acrylics paint lines. Lately, there seems to be a fair amount of discussion regarding the use of thick acrylic paints in the hobby world and what role they may have in the hobby space, so we tried out a few different brands to see what the deal was. 

What are these acryl-thicccs? These are heavily pigmented paints whose consistency and formula are between the “soft paints” of Pro Acryl, AK, Army Painter, Citadel, etc., and the “heavy body” traditional acrylic paints used for canvas painting. The idea is to provide as thick a pigment as possible, providing the most brilliant of colors, that lays flat on a surface and doesn’t leave texture behind. Of course, this means that you have to really thin down your paints, more than you would with any soft paint. If you mix it just right and apply some thin coats, you can get some really incredible results. This takes patience, practice, and a little skill to get the mixture and application right, so they’re not necessarily recommended for beginners. 

What’s the benefit? Full color control. In most miniature paints, you’re buying a mixture of pigment, medium, and binders or other additives. This means on your palette, you can encounter separation, unusual colors, or undesired mixes when you mix a few paints together. With a traditional acrylic, you can cut back the amount of paint you buy and use; however, this comes at a cost. Usually, these paints can be prohibitively expensive and are difficult to use.

In order to test these out, we decided to take the thick miniature company acrylics and line them up against some traditional art acrylics, using them to paint some Imperial Star Wars: Legion and Shatterpoint models. We also had to purchase a few tools to use these, which we detail below.

The Tools

Liquitex Flow-Aid Additive Medium

Alec: I have been using this medium for several years now, and find myself mixing it into pretty much all of my paints. Water is not recommended as a medium for acrylic paints because acrylic paints are water-based. Adding water to any acrylic paint can cause the pigment to break down, lose its pigmentation, or lose surface adhesion. So, as a control factor, I used the Flow-Aid for both acrylics I used. 

AK Acrylic Drying Retardant Gel

Randy: With the AK heavy bodies, I was also sent a bottle of the Retardant Gel, which kept the paints moist and, most importantly, not broken up.  The medium being a gel was a little weird to get used to, and I tried both adding it to the paint and using it separately on the brush, which gave me more success. I would suggest adding it to a separate container for dipping a brush into as part of your paint loading process.

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Golden High Flow Medium

Randy: I picked this up alongside my Golden Paints, which I figured would be important to keep in the medium family, similar to AK. This medium ended up being so awesome, I’m adding it to my palette from now on. It thins the paint while keeping it together, along with extending the dry time, which means blending is easier, and it won’t dry so quickly on a palette.

The Models

Having already done some ‘Learn to Paint’ articles for Star Wars: Legion and Star Wars: Shatterpoint, we both decided to paint up some Stormtroopers and Darth Vaders, as they would give us some hard angles and soft curves to blend on. And besides, why not have fun with some iconic characters that are traditionally adverse to color?

Yellow, the Color

Yellow may be the most difficult color to work with and paint. Whether you use an undercoat of tan or pink, or apply multiple thin coats, yellow is always a challenge. If you apply it too thin, then you run the risk of getting a pigmentless application. If you apply it too thick, then you get a goopy mess and can lose details. I have found that a brand’s yellow can be a strong indicator of the quality of the rest of its paints. 

The Paints 

Monument Hobbies Expert Artist Acrylics

Painted by Alec

Having used their Pro Acryl line in the past, I had high expectations for their product quality. The tubes were shipped to me in sealed bags and weren’t in any box for display. The tubes themselves were sealed with a small foil cap. 

The tubes themselves are a decent volume, but the nozzle/opening is really large. So a lot of paint comes out when you try to put any on the palette. Certainly way more than is needed for any standard miniature piece. 

I chose to paint up a synthwave Stormtrooper and do some stark contrasts of cool and warm tones. The hard edge of the armor gave me a nice boundary to work within and create sharper contrasts between the colors.

The application of paint was incredibly smooth. After thinning down the paint, the pigment was retained and blended so nicely with other paints on the model. I don’t think any pigment was sacrificed, leaving a rich color behind. I think this is the reason why I was able to get such vibrant hues for the blue-green and pinks. The paint did not stay together on the wet palette when it was mixed with Flow-Aid. It’s not the right medium to be using for these acryl-thicccs, even though they work with the soft ones. I would recommend using either the retardant gel or the proper medium mix for acrylics. 

The base, which was a blend of yellow to red, was so easy to do. I think this is due to the fact that the yellow pigment never got too thin and blended so well with the red. I did do several coats with the paints, which I recommend for any painting. I taped over the areas I didn’t want black, and reprimed it black. I only had to do a little touching up because the base itself is textured. 

The end result speaks for itself - the saturation is not altered in this photo. I was shocked by the pigmentation and how much of a difference it makes from standard soft acrylics. I still had to thin down the paints and do a lot of mixing, but it made a difference. I wouldn’t paint a whole army with mixed colors like this, but I would definitely consider it for a single piece or bust. The vibrant colors and the ability to blend so easily are truly remarkable.

Expert Artist Acrylics

Expert Artist Acrylics

Monument Hobbies

Liquitex Basics Acrylic Primary Colours Set (22ml tubes)

Painted by Alec

I picked up this bundle from a local art store. It’s a beginner set that covers the basic colors you’d need to mix for painting. Liquitex is a great brand, so I also had fairly high expectations for this. However, it became very clear very quickly that the paint is not meant for minis.

As if he did not suffer enough being Watto’s errand boy on a planet full of particulates he hates, Darth Vader was the subject of this paint. I figured the flowing cape and angles on his armor would present a unique challenge for blending and highlighting. I was right, just not in the way I thought. 

It did not mix or blend well on the wet palette. In fact, it did not do well with the Flow-Aid at all, and, through the course of thinning the paint, I found I lost a lot of pigment. I ended up doing anywhere between 6-7 coats of paint for anything to look right. The lightsaber suffered the most, and the white was just fighting me the whole time. I can still see the paint streaks and the thin colors, even after an inappropriate amount of time spent on it. 

The blue, when mixed with the black, turned into something closer to indigo, and I was really perplexed. It’s definitely a true blue, but the black is not a true black, and that led to some weird blending issues with the cape and some color tones I was not happy with. The black highlights look more purple than I was hoping, and the black-to-white metal colors just didn’t work. The white was too thick, didn’t thin well, and getting the right medium gray was too much work. I would have picked up a tube of medium gray if I knew how difficult it would be to do the blending. 

The base, in comparison to the Monument Hobbies-painted one, looks very muted. You can see how muted the yellow in the middle is. The red, while a decent red, is not nearly as red as other acrylic colors out there. With the synthwave design, stark contrast is key, and I feel like the Liquitex colors didn’t have the rich pigment I was expecting. 

Honestly, I understand why people like the Monument Hobbies Thick Acrylics. Especially if all they had to use before were traditional acrylic tubes like this. If I use Liquitex again, it will be to paint some landscape or something on canvas, not a miniature.  

AK Interactive Artist Dense Acrylics (20ml tubes)

Painted by Randy

Already being a fan of these paints, it was fun to go back into them for this project.. Firstly, I painted up a Stormtrooper, and like Alec, I wanted to give it my own special touch, which tends to lean into weathering. Besides, who doesn’t love a filthy Stormtrooper, stuck on some backwater planet, battling Rebels who simply have a better tactical advantage? As I painted the model, I took a few shortcuts. Firstly, prime in white. This makes it very easy to paint up a Stormtrooper, and has the added bonus of making the orange shoulder pad stand out, which I’ll get to in a moment. Realistically, you can get away with doing this with just Stormtroopers, maybe a few chapters of Space Marines, too. I used White Scar, which is a Citadel spray paint, as it covers well and dries fairly matte. 

My first layers of paint were to establish some base tones, but since I intended on dirtying up the model, I went with Off White, mostly all over the model, minus a few areas I wanted to stand out. I then used a mix of black and burnt umber to give me a warm black on all areas where black exists, and drybrushed some metallics on the blaster, which is pretty easy. In a way, I went for both reductive and additive styles of painting with this whole model!. For the shoulder pad, I started with a base tone of Orange + Violet, and then highlighted up to Orange, with a little bit of Yellow added at the very tips. Something I recalled was that with heavy body acrylics, you’re going to want to let them dry, unless you’ve already mixed in a retardant. I forgot to do that, and immediately ripped up my layers back to my black base tone. Remember, these are paints without additives, so you need to be patient, understand what you’re adding to the paint, and what it does. Trial and error.

Once I had all of my basic tones and highlights set, I then varnished the model. I did this primarily because I didn’t know how these paints would react to a reductive process so by layering gloss on the armor and matte on the pauldron, I could protect that paint. After doing that, I made a wash of Monument Hobby’s Newsh and the Burnt Umber paint. Newsh is an acrylic weathering medium which creates a long drying time and flow, similar to an oil wash. I figured this would be a great test of mixing the AK paint with a different medium, and I learned a big lesson here. My first coat…was a wreck. The gloss varnish reacted with the wash, creating almost a sticky paste. However, by flooding areas with water, I was able to clean off the model and start again, after using a hairdryer to ensure dryness of the varnish. My second round was much better.. The heavy body acrylic worked like a charm with the Newsh, covering the whole model and easily wiping away with a makeup sponge. This brought dirt and grime into the crevices, which I also replicated on the base. And speaking of the base, I utilized mixes of Burnt Umber for the deepest parts and Yellow Ochre with Off White for creating highlights in the dirt. Once again, having so much control over your color is a benefit of these paints. After being happy with the washes, I came back in with Off White to re-brighten my highlights, then it was time for the final weathering: enamels and some Dirty Down Moss. Enamels have great working times and can be reactivated with white spirit, which gives me finer control over the dirt. This is most noticeable on the chest of the trooper, where I laid in some Streaking Grime and pulled it down to make it seem like the trooper had dealt with a few muddy patches. I added in some Dirty Down Moss in small patches to help accentuate the vegetation part of the swamp mud, and the trooper was basically complete. 

Golden Fluid Acrylics (30ml bottles)

Painted by Randy

So for Darth Vader, I decided to use a high-end heavy body acrylic to see what the differences could be between the two brands.  This is a “professional” line of acrylics primarily sold in art stores. Some miniature painters swear by some of their colors, so to save some of my money, I only purchased the Titanium White and Pyrrole Red, which had different prices. This is already one of the first challenges when using these paints vs. AK is that depending on the pigment, you’re going to pay more.  For the sake of transparency, a bottle of Titanium White goes for $4.91 while Pyrrole Red goes for $7.85. AK’s line goes for $3.75 a tube.

However, there was definitely a difference in the paints. The Golden came out very smooth, and with a small addition of High Flow Medium, I had a perfectly useful miniature paint.  For Darth, I once again took some shortcuts. Black Matte primer from Colour Forge set the tone for him, and then for the reds, I used the Pyrrole Red with minimal amounts of Titanium White to paint the various areas where the lightsaber would light up Darth. Keeping material in mind, the shinier parts of Vader get more paint than the fabric parts, but the Golden was able to handle both of these with ease. The paints easily turned into washes thanks to a Monument medium for Washes and Glazes, which helped me tint the cloths, knock white highlights down into red lightsaber reflections, and for the white, I mixed a little of the AK Black with the titanium white and was able to create an entire spectrum of grays, which helped give me the opposite reflection and cloak highlights.

Yes, I cheated, but paint brands being able to mix is a positive, no matter what brand you end up using. I followed all of this with the same weathering techniques I used on the trooper, albeit less, and utilized some dry pigment washes to demonstrate some dust sitting on his armor (not sand, because he hates it).The base utilized the same mixtures of gray, plus some Dirty Down Rust, to give the sense that even the command center has been affected by the elements. Once again, the paints blended beautifully.

In the end, while the Golden Paints were fantastic, they do come at a high cost, which might be off-putting to some folks. For me, I may have found the perfect titanium white and pyrrole red.

Our Thoughts

Like any other paint out there, the quality of the paint can make or break the outcome of the project. It can also affect the confidence of the painter, which comes out during the painting process. Having the right tool for the job is critical. So, if you want to use a paint with more pigment in it, then giving thick acrylics a shot is probably a good idea. Honestly, there’s no one brand that is better than any other; rather, you should probably discover what works for you. While we are hobby reviewers, we are also at different stages of our painting journeys, which brings us to the next point. 

Heavy body acrylics or artist-grade acrylics are not meant for beginners. Maybe, perhaps, if the miniature painter has a background in traditional acrylic painting, this would be a suitable transition for them to get used to the different medium and techniques of painting tiny plastic figurines instead of canvas. This is even more true if they already have heavy body acrylics in their inventory. However, there are easier and more efficient entry points to get into miniature painting, for example, the basic lines from both AK and Monument are at a wonderful price point and for the most part can be used directly out of their bottles with little to no extra manipulation.. More importantly, these paints can also help build confidence with miniature painting, which is really the most fundamentally important value of any painter. 

So… are they worth it? 

Yes…but only for those who have an understanding of color theory, how to utilize mediums, and the careful balance that comes with painting miniatures.

If you’re looking to expand your miniature painting skillset, oozing yourself into the realm of acryl-thicccs and possibly experimenting a little with different degrees of pigmentation, and move yourself out of the comfort zone of soft acrylics, then we would recommend either the Monument Hobbies’ Expert Artist Acrylics or the AK Interactive Artist Dense Acrylics. If you’re just starting out on your miniature painting journey or are looking to improve your current skills, then these are not for you. They offer some amazing potential for brilliant colors and blending, but these are intermediate-to-advanced techniques.

There are always going to be new paints coming out, or some new technique or fluid to be used in combination with the paints, and so it’s hard to sift through the information. Right now, there’s probably some AI bot trawling this article to give you a summary of our opinion. Our experience with acryl-thicccs is just that. If you’re curious about these paints, go give them a try and see how they work for you. Not everyone is going to like every paint out there, and so it’s important to do a little discovery for yourself to find that right fit for you. More than anything else, have fun painting while you do. 

You only get to discover something the first time once!

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