A few days ago I bought three sets of acrylic paints issued by Italeri.
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Up to now I took advantage of two colors from RAF set. Well, so far I have very mixed experience with their use.
Consistency, appearance and interaction
Above all, the paints are very thick and absolutely require dilution - even for brush painting. Paint responds well to Testors' universal acrylic paint thinner (dedicated to Model Master and Pactra). The pigment spreads well and forms a uniform coat. Not having another, I added Agama retardant for acrylic paint - here the response was good.
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Painting
When we manage to overcome the problems related to selection of the appropriate balance between the paint and the thinner we can safely proceed to paint. Paint does not require any special airbrush settings - the ones that I use for the Model Master or Agama are also useful in this case. Paint spread very well and has excellent covering properties.
During airbrushing, it did not dry and clog the nozzle (which blocks a normal flow). The obtained surface is smooth and .... deeply matte. Unfortunately, the drying time is much longer than the Agama or Model Master and corresponds to enamel rather than acrylic. I was surprised by the appearance of a few stains due to the quickly applied thin paint.
The mechanical properties
This is the weakest side of the Italeri paint - it very poorly holds the surface. Dried paint can be readily removed from the model by slightly stronger touch of your fingertips. In the case of masking, we need to weaken the adhesive on the tape as much as possible otherwise the tape can remove huge areas of the paint. Another problem is that the paint dries too flat - as a result there is a very high risk of permanently leaving fingerprints on it which practically can not be removed - even washing the model does not help (and must be done very gently). It all means that painting of multicolored patterns will be a challenging task.
I do not know how it will be look using tack-it (Blue Tac) masking, but I am afraid of the problems I may face with traces left by this type of masking.... It seems that we need to secure already painted parts byoverpainting with a proven and "durable" varnish from another manufacturer...
Summary
As I said in the introduction - after two uses of the Italeri acrylic paints I don't know if poor mechanical properties will be compensated by other values?
Paints are supplied in bottles with two times larger capacity (20 ml) than the current standard is. Also, higher paint density suggests that from these 20 ml we will get much more paint coverage than in the case of the competition. Also, the price seems to be attractive - price for 10 ml of paint is about 60-75% of the price of 10 ml of the other producers paint.
Surely this is not a product designed for the novice modeler, and even the experienced can be unpleasantly surprised several times ...
Best regards
Hubert