Back at Adepticon 2024 I purchased six of the then new Turbo Dork Metallic paints. I brought them home and attempted to use them but I could not shake them enough to get the metallic flakes up from the bottom so I gave up on the product. Fast forward to Adepticon 2025 and I went to the Turbo Dork booth to speak with their team about their product. The team at Turbo Dork told me the metal flakes are super heavy in this line and if left for a while they need to be stirred before use. I was pointed out the cap has a divot to help open the lid.

One of the things I had done to attempt to be able to shake the paint enough to use was store the bottles upside down. While that didn’t help you can see how thick the metal flakes are in this picture I took of a bottle I opened that I had stored upside down. That is a lot of metallic flakes!

You can see in this picture how much separation there is between the pigment and the binder. (The paint on the left was stored on the side, the middle right side up, and the right top down.)

After manually stirring the paints I was able to actually use them, which I did on this Zeo Genesis model I posted last week.

Once the paint was stirred I really enjoyed using it. Additionally, when I went to use them the next day they shook up nicely and didn’t require any manual stirring. The paints have ball bearings in the bottle to help mix the pigment, but the pigment is so thick I didn’t know this until I mixed the paint by hand. The next day as the pigment hadn’t sunk to the bottom yet the ball bearing was free and helped mix the paint nicely.

I painted these bases with the colors you see in the picture. I should have posed the bases in the other direction so they aligned with the paints, but it is what it is! The paints from left to right were used from top to bottom. The base on the left has one coat, the right has two. I didn’t base coat the bases and as you can see the coverage is pretty darn good with just one coat for most of the colors. For some reason the Redrum was very milky despite being very well mixed. The other colors were terrific however and have great coverage and a brilliant shine.

I really like the vivid colors of these paints, they have a wonderful shine and a lot of pigment. If you aren’t using them regularly you will need to take the time to open the bottle and manually stir them which means you’ll be losing some paint to your stir stick but you can brush most of the paint back into the bottle. If I was Turbo Dork I’d consider putting this paint into a non-dropper bottle as you will need to get into the bottle more than a normal paint. I also found the dropper got clogged on two of my paints after very minimal use and the dropper is so skinny my normal “pokey” tool was too big to fit without damaging the dropper. Each bottle is $7 USD which I find reasonable considering the bottles are 22ml of high quality paint!

I would recommend Turbo Dork metallic paint, especially since they have 46 different colors! The only warning is you will need to mix them prior to use which isn’t a deal breaker, it’s just something you should know about. If getting really vibrant paint in colors that are not available anywhere else the crew of Turbo Dork is really cool, don’t let their name fool you!

-Wachtmeister