introduction

Currently, modellers are overwhelmed with quality products available for our hobby and it is always exciting to see what else can be offered. Some time ago AK-interactive, one of the leading brands in painting and weathering products started a new line of “true metal” paints. These are metallic paints on a wax base, something that I’ve never heard about before. Interestingly these are possible to apply using a brush, finger or even thin down and spray with airbrush. While writing this text you might have already heard about their new line called “Xtreme metal” – paints dedicated to airbrushing, however, I do not possess any so can’t comment on them at all.

In my case I had 2 tubes of true metal paints – gun metal and brass. I tested these in several applications – painting a piece of un-primed resin with subsequent polishing and use of the paints on vinyl tracks with a brush and no polishing.

Testing on resin piece
I had a shell casing of panzer IV ammo. Half of them were painted with a brush using true metal brass paint (ref AK460) and the other half had AK461 gun metal applied. Drying time was quite fast (when finishing painting gun metal portion the brass was dry. The coating was satisfactory and the paint was adhering to the un-primed resin without any trouble when touching it with a finger. The overall appearance of painted item was “metallic” although a bit dull. Next I tried to polish it using a finger and polishing stick. Here one has to be careful as excessive pressure might scrap some paint off, maybe this is why it is recommended to prime parts by the manufacturer? Nevertheless the parts were really shining after polishing. Very nice result and looks convincing.

Testing on vinyl tracks
For that trial I took a pair of vinyl tracks from old Tamiya Jagdpanzer IV set. These are not the best option and many modellers would replace them immediately, but my aim was to make a convincing result out of vinyl’s. Here I first primed them with acrylic primer, applied a brown enamel wash and put lots of pigments with pigment fixer. Using hair dryer to accelerate drying time I was able to finish this experiment within 30 minutes, however you can see slight deformation of tracks due to heat. Just be careful when you work with vinyl! Finally I poured some AK-interactive Gun metal (AK461) out of the tube and applied it with a brush to one track and with a finger to another. Can you say which one was brushed and which one wasn’t? in my case no… Again, very convincing metal look. Here I haven’t polished a thing, just left them as they are.

Altogether I find these new AK-interactive “true metal” paints interesting and one can get really nice results with them.
For more info please check this video from AK-interactive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPNGFAgWmGU