New And Improved Model Paint, Fingers Crossed

Hard not to notice that the model paint landscape is in the midst of a big ol’ wave of change. Again.

The previous wave of change was marked by the passage of Floquil, PollyS, Pactra, Modelmaster, and a big chunk of the Testors square bottle line over the past decade or so. Although the disappearance of these brands–all owned by the Rustoleum parent company and discontinued for corporate bean-counting and not hobby-murdering reasons–is reliably cited as a sign of the impending Death of the Hobby, the Golden Age of Modeling seems to keep yielding even more paint choices than ever before.

The big modeling podcasts joke about the seemingly weekly emergence of a new model paint line, and yes, I even joined in on the gag when I first appeared on Plastic Model Mojo back in 2021.

And it’s true: post-Floquil/PollyS/Pactra/Modelmaster, scale modelers currently enjoy several different embarrassments of riches when it comes model paint. And it’s not just variety of paint brands, but variety of paint types, including acrylics, enamels, lacquers, acrylic lacquers, not to mention dizzying choices of weathering and effects products.

The current big ol’ wave of change in the model paint landscape primarily involves Spain-based paint manufacturers Vallejo, AK Interactive, and Ammo. Over the past year or so, all three of the Spanish paint makers have announced major revamps of their paint lines–not just new colors. but major reformulations of their products.

These Spanish brands have achieved wide acceptance and satisfactory availability in North America, although Tamiya and GSI Creos (usually called by its legacy name, Gunze Sangyo or just plain Gunze), joined by Humbrol, offer what arguably passes for the North American mainstream of commonly available modeling paints.

More to the point, brick-and-mortar and online hobby shops tend to have reliable stocks of Tamiya, Gunze, and usually Humbrol products, while the availability of Vallejo, AK, and Ammo products is at best quirky. It’s rare, for example, to see all of the products of any one of these Spanish brands fully in stock at the same time–in person, there are typically gaps in the Vallejo, AK, and Ammo paint racks. Even rarer is finding all three Spanish brands displayed or offered simultaneously by a single retailer.

Shifts and interruptions in the global supply chain are a contributing factor to the Spanish brands’ quirky availability, as well as wild variability in how individual retailers obtain and manage their stock. Rivalry and competitiveness between the three Spanish model paint companies, who share a complicated and occasionally acrimonious history, likely contributes to the unevenness of their distribution in North America.

Back to the changes afoot among Spanish hobby paint makers:

AK led the way with reinvention of their main acrylic paint offering under the branding ‘3Gen’ over the past couple of years, which has been generally received well by modelers. Changes to the formulation and packaging of AK’s Real Colors line of acrylic lacquers–my preferred paint, comparable to Tamiya X- and XF- or Gunze Mr. Color—were finally announced in the past month or so, following a year of rumors and speculation that AK Real had been discontinued, reinforced by the increasing scarcity of AK Real paints at retail in recent months.

Meanwhile, Ammo has announced its ‘Atom’ line of reformulated acrylic paints, which are touted (and have been demonstrated) as having lacquer-like and improved spraying qualities. Vallejo has also announced reformulation of its own flagship Model Color line, though without claims of dramatic new qualities or sprayability.

What is noteworthy is that two of the big Spanish paintmakers are actively acknowledging that many modelers (including me) prefer the qualities of lacquers over acrylics: friendlier to spraying with better flow and atomization; robust adhesion and durability; quick drying; resistance to organic solvents commonly used in weathering and effects. AK offers an acrylic lacquer; Ammo offers an acrylic aiming for lacquer-like performance.

The emergence of new, sometimes boutique model lacquer brands, and their use by influential modelers, is likely contributing to AK and Ammo’s focus on lacquers. Tamiya’s LP- series lacquers are increasingly available in North America, after years of being a kind of Japan-only gray-market delicacy requiring heroic shipping or smuggling across the Pacific. Meanwhile, boutique lacquer brands, often airbrush-ready, sometimes associated with a specific geography or modeling genre, like MRP, SMS, Scale Colors, Gaia Notes, and others, are increasing in number and availability, but still niche items that usually don’t appear in racks at local hobby shops, and certainly not in HobbyTownUSAs, Hobby Lobbys, or Michaels. A wee bit of nostalgia for the O.G. model lacquer, Floquil, might also be spurring interest.

To be sure, there’s more than a little bit of marketing and branding fluffery happening here, and possibly some clever misdirection. Re-branding and tinkering with product formulas might indeed be driven by actual, real substantive product improvement. Equally likely is rebranding as a kind of cover for changes to packaging and formulation necessitated by business considerations, such as improving margin with a cheaper mix of raw materials or lower cost packaging, or compliance with safety or environmental regulations.

In the case of AK Real Colors, the switch from Tamiya- and Gunze-like glass jars to dropper bottles is particularly noteworthy. For AK’s supply chain and production managers, the soon-to-be-discontinued glass jars were an outlier and exceptional for a company that packages most of its other products in plastic. Easy to imagine bean counters in the AK back office breathing a sigh of relief at getting AK Real’s logistics—supplies of empty bottles, bottle-filling equipment, outbound boxes, weight, and handling—aligned with the rest of their products.

But AK’s financials and overhead costs are of scant concern to modelers (other than myself and perhaps Kentucky Dave of Plastic Model Mojo). For end-using modelers, AK Real’s switch to dropper bottles should mean more efficient, sparing use of paint, and lower consumption of pipettes. The dropper bottles will also occupy less storage space in a drawer or on shelves, as well as fit into the various paint storage/organizer rack products that are already in many modelers workspaces. Speaking of paint racks, the new size of AK Real bottles might entice more retailers to actually carry the line, either in a rack previously intended for another dropper-bottle paint line, or in a newer, svelter rack that requires less display space.

Above all, new and improved AK, Ammo, and Vallejo paint products ought to continue doing what has made them successful so far: they should keep on enabling better modeling experiences and better models. What most modelers want to know is how highly publicized changes in Spanish model paint will impact their modeling.

• Will these new paints be easy to find and buy?
• Will these new paints work with equipment and supplies already on the bench?
• Will these new paints work with existing or familiar techniques?

I look forward to what appear to be improvements in my go-to AK Real paints, and with experimenting with Atom, Gen3, and Vallejo’s new reformulated products. My further hope is that steady supplies of these products can make their way to the North American market and into more retailers of all types.

Now back the Golden Age of Modeling currently in progress.