Acrylic Inks are inks with pigments instead of dye, and turned to water resistant once dried. They are not must-have, but they can be useful in certain cases.

You may think that you could dilute acrylic paints to behaves like acrylic inks. That's true if you can add proper amount of acrylic binder and water, but that makes the mixture less pigmented. So the point is that they're watery, but well pigmented. Also, most artists’ acrylic inks dry to satin finish. In this blog, I will concentrate the use-cases of acrylic inks that can not be easily achieved by regular miniature paints.

Like other artistic colors, vendors usually specify whether the ink is opaque or transparent.

I found that transparent inks are more useful than opaque inks. One of the reason is that most regular model paints are already opaque. There are only two use-cases for the opaque acrylic inks at this moment. First, since it is already watery, you could use them in airbrush. Airbrushing acrylic inks provides you better coverage, because once you dilute regular paints, it will be less pigmented. Since I don't use airbrush, there is little I can say, but you can find several Youtube videos that show you airbrushing with them. Try starting from this one from Miniac: What are Inks for?

Another use case is that you can use with a nib pen to draw a pattern or place a dot (like eyes) on the miniature surface. Unlike regular nib pen inks that use dye, acrylic inks are water resistant and tent to leave hard flim, it’s likely to clog the water flow in the nib pen. Be sure to clean it after or during use. (Never use them in a fountain pen). Some goblins below has a war paints on their foreheads, where I used nib pen with acrylic inks.

For the transparent inks, you can use them for glazing or filtering. When you apply transparent inks, they can never completely cover the base tone, but they can alter the color. For example, if you apply transparent yellow ink on the red surface, it will turn to orange. Transparent yellow acrylic inks can be very useful for highlighting green or red surfaces. For example, you can create smooth rich highlight on the muscles of the green Orc using transparent yellow acrylic inks. I found that this is much easier than using diluted yellow model paints. To achieve this using model paints, you need to dilute the paints significantly, and need to create 5 or more glazing layers. Also, by doing this, it is likely to create white-ish coffee stain effect on the surface. I suspect that most model yellow paints are mixed with white pigment such as Titanium white. Anyway, it’s easy to create smooth highlight towards yellow but it may not have enough strength of the yellow. For the brightest highlight, you may want to mix with regular acrylic yellow paint. Yellow-ish highlights on green skins above are done in ink.

Another use-case is to create custom wash. By diluting with water with some acrylic matte mediums optionally flow improver, you can create your own colored wash. This can be used for shading, or used like Citadel's Contrast paints. (See Goobertown's Youtube for more: Contrast Paint? Make Your Own Custom Washes Instead!) I like to create magenta wash, for the recessed are of Orc skin. Since magenta is a complementary to green, it can create proper shade with slight red-ish tint. You can also create a wash using opaque inks but it’s likely to create coffee stain problem.

I used transparent yellow ink to highlight green skin of the left miniature and the center one. For the centered one, I used magenta ink shade in the recessed area of the arm.

For general purpose shade, I like to create a blue-ish gray (a.k.a. Payne's Gray) and brown-ish gray. It's possible to create these two by combining blue ink and brown ink. No need to pick the precise hue as long as they are transparent (or semi-opaque). Try to pick Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna (or Burnt Umber).

Another tip is to use transparent inks to give extra hue to the metallic acrylic paints. For example, you can add some red/orange inks to the gold paints for copper or bronze hue. Or, just apply metallic paint first, and apply inks to glaze the surface.

If you’re on tight budget, here is the list for essential colors.

If you can afford, try Liquitex's Muted line as well. They are dull, usable as shade directly. They come into a set, which may be a cost-effective.

To give you the hint of the color, here's my own swatch for some Citadel shade, Royal Talens Amsterdam Acrylic Inks and Liquitex Acrylic Inks Muted set. This photo is taken in my room which does not have good light condition so you should not take this as a reference. I also included some fluorescent colors and metallic inks as well. Ink names with "Reflex" are from Amsterdam Inks, and "Fluorescent Blue" is from Daler-Rowney FW Acrylic Inks.

When I read various articles and Youtube videos, a lot of hobbyist talks about FW inks, but never Amsterdam inks. I never had experience with FW inks except the Fluorescent Blue one, so I cannot say which one is better or worse. However, FW Fluorescent blue does not stand out much compared to the other fluorescent colors from Amsterdam inks. I suspect that it's not FW inks fault, but the blue dye itself. (Note that fluorescent paints use fluorescent dye, not pigments, so that they have poor lightfastness.) Perhaps that's why Amsterdam does not produce fluorescent blue ink in the first place. I use these fluorescent inks to highlight monster eyes or plasma gun effect, and all Amsterdam Reflex serious do the purpose pretty well. Again, I never properly compared Amsterdam and FW inks on other color range, so this is not a proper comparison. The same for the Liqutex inks. I only have specialized muted lines, so cannot compare fairly. Although the pigments in the muted lines separated easily. You need to shake them more than other colored inks.

For metallic inks, there is nothing special about them compared to the regular model metallic acrylic paints. It's more watery, so sometimes it is easier to paint evenly but little difference. There was huge discount was going on the local artist's shop so I just picked them. I wish I have more metallic paints for better comparison but all I have at this moment is some Citadel metallic paints at this moment.