AK Interactive builds its catalogue around ranges that differ in body and behaviour, not only in palette. One is made for brushwork on figures, another for spraying large vehicle panels, a third delivers artist-grade pigment strength, and a fourth gives you transparent inks for shading. Shades are often tied to traceable specifications, so you can build from documentation rather than from a period photograph and a guess.
That breadth is useful once you know the map and confusing before you do. The sections below sort the ranges by the question that actually decides the choice: what are you painting, and what are you painting it with.
Ask what the surface is and which tool is in your hand. That picks the range; only then do you hunt for the shade inside it. All of them share an acrylic binder, so they coexist on one model and can be mixed together without trouble, which means a palette assembled across two or three lines behaves as one system rather than as a compromise.
The division is practical rather than marketing: body and pigment load differ between the lines because a thick figure paint and a pre-thinned spraying paint cannot be the same product. Read the headings below as a map of jobs, not of colour charts.
Real Colors carries historically referenced tones with standard codes, and Air Series offers the same shades ready to spray. For ground subjects, Brush & Airbrush is formulated to handle either method of application.
3rd Generation Acrylic is the thick line aimed at uniforms and equipment, and Figure Acrylics extends it with the shadow and highlight tones for specific uniforms.
Artistic Dense provides heavily pigmented colours named after artist pigments, Color Punch supplies saturated accent tones, and The Inks gives transparent inks that settle into recesses and shade in a single step.
Every range thins with its matching product and takes layering well, so the usual trouble of moving between lines mid-build simply does not arise. Start with the one range your current project needs and extend the shelf from there. To see where this system sits among the others on the market, open the overview of acrylic model paints.
